ISLANDS IN THE SKY
by
ARTHUR C. CLARKE


A SIGNET BOOK from

NEW AMERICAN UBrlm

PUBLISHED BY

the NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY

OF CANADA LIMITED

 FOR IN

From an Elizabethan to a Georgian

COPYRIGHI~ 1952 By ARTHm C. CLARKE

All rights reserved.  No part of this book may be reproduced without
permission.  For information address Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc."
521

Fifth Avenue, New York, New york 10017.

Copyright in Great Britain and the British Dominions and Possessions

Copyright in the Republic of the Philippines

Published as a SIGNET BOOK BY arrangement with Holt, Rinehart and
Winston,

Inc.

FIRST SIGNET PRINTING, MARCH, 1960

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

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REGISTERED TRADEMARK- MARCA REGISTRADA (D NEMO EN WINNIPEG, CANADA

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 CONTENTS

1 Jackpot to Space 9

2. Good-by to Gravity 19

3. The Morning Star 40

4. A Plagme of Pirates 53

5. Siar Turn 64

6. Hospild in Space 76

7. World of Monsters 91

8. Into the Abyss 101

9. The Shot from the Moon 116

10.  Radio Satellite 128

11.  Starlight Hotel 137

12.  The Long Fall Home 149

ISLANDS IN THE SKY

 1 JACKPOT TO SPACE

IT WAS UNCLE Jim who'd said, "Whatever happens, Roy, don't worry about
it.

Just relax and enjoy yourself."  I remembered those words as I followed
the other competitors into the big studio, and I don't think I felt
particularly nervous.  After all, however badly I wanted the prim, it
was only a game.

The audience was already in its place, talking and fidgeting and
waiting for the program to begin.  It gave a little cheer as we walked
up on to the stage and took our seats.  I had -a quick look at the five
other competitors, and was a bit disappointed.  Each of them looked
quite sure that he was going to win.

There was another cheer from the audience as Elmer Schmitz, the Quiz

Master, came into the studio.  I'd met him before, of course, in the
semifinals, and I expect you've seen him often enough on TV.  He gave
us some last minute instructions, moved to his place under the spot
lights, and signaled to the cameras.  There was a sudden hush as the
red light 'e on.  From where I was sitting in g

I could.  see Elmer adjusim his smile.

"Good evening, folks!  This is Elmer Schmitz, presenting to you the
finalists in our Aviation Quiz Program, brought to you by arrangement
with

World Airways, Incorporated.  The six young men we have here tonight..
." , But I guess it wouldn't be very modest to repeat the things he
said about us.  It all added up to the fact that we knew a lot about
everything that flew-in the air and outside it-and had beaten about
five thousand other members of the Junior Rocket Club in a series of
nationwide contests.  Tonight would be the final elimination tests to
select the winner.

It started easily enough, on the lines of earlier rounds.  Elmer fired
off a question at each of us in turn, and we had twenty seconds in
which to answer.  Mine was pretty easy; he wanted to know the altitude
record for a pure jet.  Everyone else got his answer right too.  I
think those first questions were just to give us confidence.

Then it got tougher.  We couldn't see our scores, which were being
flashed up on a screen facing the audience, but you could tell when
you'd given the right answer by the noise they made.  I forgot to say
that you lost a point when you gave the wrong reply.  That was to
prevent guessing.  If you didn't know, it was best to say nothing at
all.

As far as I could tell, I'd made only one mistake, but there was a kid
from

New Washington who I thought hadn't made any-7-though I couldn't be
sure of this, because it was difficult to keep track of the others
while you were wondering what Elmer had coming up for you.  I was
feeling rather gloomy, when suddenly the lights dimmed and a hidden
-movie projector went into action.

"Now," said Elmer, "the last round!  You'll each see some kind of
aircraft or rocket for one' second and in that time you must identify
it.  Ready?"

A second sounds awfully short, but it isn't really.  You can grasp a
great deal in that time, enough to recognize anything You know really
well.  But some of the machines they showed us went back over a hundred
years.  One or two even had ProPellorsl This was lucky for me: Id
always been interested in the history of flying and could spot some of
those antiques.  That was where the boy from New Washington fell down
badly They gave him a picture of the original Wright biplane, which you
can see in the Smithsonian any day, and he didn't know it Afterward he
said he was interested only in rockets, and that the test wasn't fair.
But I thought it served him right.

They gave me the Dornier DO-X and a B-52, and I knew them both.  So I
wasn!t really surprised when Elmer called out my name as soon as the
lights went up.  Still, it was a proud moment as I walked over to him,
with the cameras following me and the audience clapping in the
background.

"Congratulations, Royl" said Elmer heartily, shaking my hand.  "Almost
a perfect score.  You missed only one question.  I have great pleasure
in announcing you as the winner of this World Airways Contest.  As you
know, the prim is a trip, all expenses paid, to any place in the world.
Were all interested to hear your choice.  What is it going to be?  You
can go anywhere you like between the North and South Polesl"

My lips went kind of dry.  Though I'd made all my plans weeks ago, it
was different now that the time had actually come."  I felt awfully
lonely -in that huge studio, with everyone around me so quiet and
waiting for what I was going to say.  My voice sounded a long way off
when I answered.  I want to go to the Inner Station."

Elmer looked puzzled, surprised and annoyed all at once.  There was a
sort of rustle from the audience, and I heard someone give a little
laugh.

Perhaps that made Elmer decide to be funny too.

"Ha, ha, very amusing, Royl But the prize is anywhere on earth.  You
must stick to the rules, you knowl"

I could tell he was laughing at me, and that made me mad.  So I came
back with: "I've read the rules very carefully.  And they don't say 'on
earth."  They say, "To any part of the earth."

Theres a big difference."

Elmer was smart.  He knew there was trouble brewing, for his grin faded
out at once, and he looked anxiously at the TV cameras.

"Go on," he said.

I cleared my throat

"In 2054," 1 continued, "the United States, like all the other members
of the Atlantic Federation, signed the Tycho Convention, which decided
bow far into space any planet's legal rights extended.  Under that
Convention, the

Inner Station is part of earth, because it's inside the thousand
kilometer limit."

Elmer gave me a most peculiar look.  Then he relaxed a little and
said,

"Tell-me, Roy, is your dad an attorney?"

I shook my head.  "No, he isn't."

Of course I might have added, "But my Uncle Jim is."  I decided not to;
there was going to be enough trouble anyway.

Elmer made a few attempts to, make me change my mind, but there was
nothing doing.  Time was running out and the audience was on my side.
Finally he gave up and said with a laugh:

"Well, you're a very determined young man.  You've won the prize,
anyway, and it looks as if the legal eagles take over from here.  I
hope the res something left for you when they've finished wranglingl"

I rather hoped so tool

Of course, Elmer was right in thinking I'd not worked Wl this out by
myself.

Uncle Jim, who's counselor fora big atomic energy combine, had spotted
the opportunity oon after I'd entered the contest.  He'd told me what
to ay and had promised that World Airways couldn't wriggle out of it.
Even if they could, so many people had seen me on the air that it would
be very bad publicity for them if they tried.  "Just stick to your
guns, Roy," he'd said, "and don't agree to anything until you've talked
it over with me.

Mom and Pop were pretty mad about the, whole business.  They'd been
watching, and as soon as I started bargaining they knew what had
happened.  Pop rang up Uncle Jim at once and gave him a piece of his
mind (I heard about it afterward), but it was too late for them to stop
me.

You see, I'd been crazy to go out into space for as long as I can
remember.

I was sixteen when all this happened, and rather big for my age.  I'd
read everything I could get hold of about aviation and astronautics,
seen all the movies and telecasts from space, and made up my mind that
someday I was going to look back and watch the earth shrinking behind
me.  I'd made models of famous spaceships, and put rocket units in some
of them until the neighbors raised a fuss.  In my room I have hundreds
of photographs, not only of most of the ships you care to name, but all
the important places on the planets as well.

Mom and Pop had not minded this interest, but they thought it was
something

I'd grow out of.  "Look at Joe Donovan," they'd say.  (Joe's the chap
who runs the copter repair depot in our district.  He was going to be
a

Martian colonist when he was -your age.  Earth wasn't good enough for
him!

Well, he's never been as far as the moon, and I don't suppose he ever
will.

He's quite happy here."  But I wasn't so sure.  I've seen Joe looking
up at the sky as the outgoing rockets draw their white vapor trails
through the stratosphere, and sometimes I think he'd give everything he
owns to go with them.

Uncle Jim (that's Pop's brother) was the one who really understood how
I felt about things.  He'd been to Mars two or three times, to Venus
once, and to the moon so often be couldn't count the times.  He had the
kind of job where people actually paid him to do these things.  I'm
afraid he was considered a very disturbing influence around our
house.

It was about a week after I won the contest that I heard from World

Airways.  They were very polite, in an icy sort of way, and said that
they'd agreed that the terms of the competition allowed me to go to the
Inner

Station.  (They couldn't help adding their disappointment that I

hadn't chosen to go on one of their luxury flights inside the
atmosphere.

Uncle Jim said what really upset them was the fact that my choice would
cost at least ten times as much as they'd bargained for.) Therewere,
however, two conditions.  First, I had to get my parents' consent.
Second, I would have to pass the standard medical tests for space
crew.

IT say this about Mom and Pop-though they were still pretty mad, they
wouldn't stand in my way.  After all, space travel was safe enough, and
I was only going a few hundred miles up-scarcely any distance!  So
after a little argument they signed the forms and sent them off.  I'm
pretty sure that World Airways had hoped they'd refuse to let me go.

That left the second obstacle, the medical exam.  I didn't think it was
fair having to take that: from all accounts it was pretty tough, and if
I failed, no one would be more, pleased than World Airways.

The nearest place where I could take the tests was the Department of
Space

Medicine at Johns Hopkins, which meant an hour's flying in the

Kansas-Washington jet and a couple of short 'copter trips at either
end.

Though I'd made dozens of longer journeys, I was so excited that it
seemed like a new experience.  In a way, of course, it was, because if
everything went properly it would open up a new chapter in my life.

I'd got everything ready the night before, even though I was going to
be away from home for only a few hours.  It was a fine evening, so I
carried my little telescope out of doors to have a look at the stars.
It's not much of an instrument-just a couple of lenses in a wooden
tube--but I'd made it myself and was quite proud of it.  When the moon
was half-full, it would show all the bigger lunar mountains, as well as
Saturn's rings and the moons of Jupitir.

But tonight I was after something else, something not so easy to find.
I knew its approximate orbit, because our local astronomer's club had
worked out the figures for me.

So I set up the telescope as carefully as I could and slowly  s began
to sweep across the stars to the southwest, checking against the map

I'd already prepared.

The search took about fifteen minutes.  In the field of the telescope
was a handful of stars-and something that was not a star.  I could just
make out a tiny oval shape, far too small to show any details.  It
shone brilliantly up there in the blazing sunlight outside the shadow
of the earth, and it was moving even as I watched.  An astronomer of a
century before would have been sorely puzzled by it, for it was
something new in the sky.  It was Met

Station Two, six thousand miles up and circling the earth four times a
day.

The Inner Station was too far to the south to be visible from my
latitude: you had to live near the Equator to see it shining in the
sky, the brightest and most swiftly moving of all the "stars."  ,

I tried to imagine-what it was like up there in that floating bubble,
with the emptiness of space all around.  At this very moment, the
scientists aboard must be looking down at me just as I was looking up
at them.  I wondered what kind of life they led-and remembered that
with any luck I'd soon know for myself.

The bright, tiny disk I had been watching suddenly turned orange, then
red, and began to fade from sight like a dying ember.  In a few seconds
it had vanished completely, though the stars were still shining as
brightly as ever in the field of the telescope.  Met Station Two had
raced into the shadow of the earth and would remain eclipsed until it
emerged again, about an hour later, in the southeast.  It was "night"
aboard the Space Station, just as it was down here on earth.  I packed
up the telescope and went to bed.

East of Kansas City, where I went aboard the Washing-, ton jet, the
land is flat for five hundred miles until you reach the Appalachians. A
century earlier I should have been flying over millions of acres of
farm land, but that had all vanished when agriculture moved out to sea
at the end of the twentieth century.  Now the ancient prairies were
coming back, and with them the great buffalo herds that had roamed this
land when the Indians were its only masters.  The main industrial
cities and mining centers hadn't changed much, but the smaller towns
had vanished and in a few more years there would be no sign that they
had ever existed.

I think I was a lot more nervous when I went up the' wide marble steps
of the Department of S3ace Medicine than when I entered the final round
of the

Vorld Airways Contest.  If I'd failed that, I might have had another
chance later-but if the doctors said "no," then I'd never be able to go
out into space.

There were two kinds of tests, the physical and the psychological.  I
had to do all sorts of silly things, like running on a treadmill while
holding my breath, trying to hear very faint sounds in a noise proof
room, and identifying dim, colored lights.  At one point they amplified
my heartbeat thousands of times: it was an eerie sound and gave me the
creeps, but the doctors said it was OX

They seemed a very friendly crowd, and after a while, I got the
definite impression that -they were on my side and doing their best to
get me through.  Of course, that helped a lot and I began to think it
was all good fun-almost a game, in fact.

I changed my mind after a test in which they sat me inside a box and
spun it round in every possible direction.  When I came out I was
horribly sick and couldn't.stand upright.  That was the.  worst moment
I had, because I was sure Id failed.  But it was really all right: if I
hadn't been sick there would have been something wrong with me.

After all this they let me rest for an hour before the psychological
tests.

I wasn't worried much about those, as I'd met them before.  There were
some simple jigsaw puzzles, a few sheets of questions to be answered
("Four of the following five words have something in common.  Underline
them.") and some tests for quickness of eye and hand.  Finally they
attached a lot of wires to my head and took me into a narrow, darkened
corridor with a closed door ahead of me.

"Now listen carefully, Roy," said the psychologist who'd been doing the
tests.  "I'm going to leave you now, and the, lights will go out. Stand
here until you receive further instructions, and then do exactly what
you're told.  Don't worry about these wires.  They will follow you
when

YOU move.  O.K.?"

"Yes," I said, wondering what was going to happen next.

The lights dimmed, and for a minute I was in complete darkness.  Then a
very faint rectangle of red light appeared, and I knew that the door
ahead of me was opening, though I couldn't hear a sound.  I tried to
see what was beyond the door, but the light was too dim.

I knew the wires that had been attached to my head were recording my
brain

Impulses.  So whatever happened, I would try to keep calm and
collected.

A voice came out of the darkness from a bidden loudspeaker.

"Walk through the door you see ahead of you, and stop as soon as you
have passed it."

I obeyed the order, though it wasn't easy to walk straight in that
faint light, with a tangle of wires trailing behind me.

I never heard the door shutting, but I knew somehow that it had closed,
and when I reached back with my hand I found I was standing in front of
a smooth sheet of plastic.  It was completely dark now; even the dim
red light had gone.

It seemed a long time before anything happened.  I must have been
standing there in the darkness for almost ten minutes, waiting for the
next order.

Once or twice I whistled softly, to see if there was any echo by which
I could judge the size of the room.  Though I couldn't be sure, I got
the impression that it was quite a large place.

Then, without any warning, the lights came on, not in a sudden flash,
which would have blinded me, but in a very quick build-up that took
only two or three seconds.  I was able to see my surroundings
perfectly, and I'm not ashamed to say that I yelled.  it was a
perfectly normal room~ except for one thing.  There was ;L table with
some papers lying on it, three armchairs, bookcases against one wall, a
small desk, an ordinary TV set.  The sun seemed to be shining through.
the window, and some curtains were waving slightly in the breeze.  At
the moment the lights came on, the door opened and a man walked in.  He
picked up a paper from the table, and flopped down in one of the
chairs.  He was just beginning to read when he looked up and saw me.
And when I say "up," I mean it.  For that's what was wrong with the
room.  I wasn't standing on the floor, down there with the chairs and
bookcases.  I was fifteen feet up in the air, scared out of my wits and
flattened against the "ceiling' " with no means of support and nothing
within reach to catch hold of!  I clawed at the smooth surface behind
me, but it was as flat as glass.  There was no way to stop myself from
falling, and the floor looked very hard and a long way down.

 2 GOOD-BY TO.  GRAVITY

THE FALL NEVER CAME, and my moment of panic passed swiftly.  The whole
thing was an illusion of some kind, for the floor felt firm beneath my
feet, whit ever my eyes told me.  I stopped clutching at the door
through which I had entered, the door which my eyes tried to convince
me was part of the ceiling Of course, it was absurdly simple!  The room
I seemed to be looking down at was really seen reflected in a large
mirror immediately in front of me, a mirror at an angle of forty-five
degrees to the vertical.  I was actually standing in the upper part of
a tall room that was "bent" horizontally through a right angle, but
because of the mirror them-was no way of telling this.

I went down on my hands and knees and cautiously edged my way forward.
It took a lot of will power to do this, for my eyes stiff told me that
I was crawling headfirst down the side of a vertical wall.  After a few
feet, I

came to a sudden drop and peered over the edge.  There below me, really
below me this time, was the room into which I had been looking!  The
man in the armchair was grinning up at me as if to say, "We gave you
quite a shock didn't we?"  I could see him equally.  well, of course,
by looking at his reflection in the mirror straight ahead of me.

The door behind me opened and the psychologist came in.  He was
carrying a long strip of paper in his hand, and he chuckled as he waved
it at me.

"We've got all your reactions on the tape, Roy," he aid.  "Do you know
what this test was for?"

"I think .1 can guess," I said, a little ruefully.  "Is it to discover
how

I behave when gravity is wrong?"

"That's the idea.  It's what we call an orientation test.  In space you
won't have any gravity at all, and some people are never able to get
used to it.

This test eliminates most of them."

I hoped it wouldn't eliminate me, and I spent a very uncomfortable
half-hour waiting for the doctors to make up their minds.  But I
needn't have worried.  As I said before, they were on my side and were
just as determined to get me through as I was myself.

The New Guinea mountains, just South of the Equator and rising in
places more than three miles above sea level, must once have been about
the wildest and most inaccessible spots on earth.  Although the
helicopter had made them as easy to reach as anywhere else, it was not
until the twenty-first century that they became important as the
world's main springboard into space.

There are three good reasons for this.  First of all, the fact that
they are so near the Equator means that, because of the earth's spin,
they're moving from west to east at a thousand -miles an hour.  That's
quite a useful start for a ship on its way out to space.  Their height
means that all the denser layers of the atmosphere are below them, thus
the air resistance is reduced and the rockets can work more
efficiently.  And perhaps most important of all is the fact that there
are ten thousand miles of open Pacific stretching away from them to the
east.  You can't launch spaceships from inhabited areas, because apart
from the danger if anything goes wrong, the unbelievable noise of an
ascending ship would deafen everyone for miles around.

Port Goddard is on a great plateau, leveled by atomic blasting, almost
two and a half miles up.  There is no way to reach it by
land--everything comes in by air.  It is the meeting place for ships of
the atmosphere and ships of space.

When I first saw it from our approaching jet, it looked like a tiny
white rectangle among the mountains.  Great valleys packed with
tropical forests stretched as far as one could see.  In some of those
valleys, I was told, there are still savage tribes that no one has ever
contacted.  I wonder what they thought of the monsters flying above
their heads and filling the sky with their roaring!

The small amount of luggage I had been allowed to take had been sent on
ahead of me, and I wouldn't see it until I reached the Inner Station.
When I stepped out o e jet into the cold, clear air of Port Goddard, I
already felt so far above sea level that I automatically looked up into
the sky to see if I could find my destination.

But I wasn't allowed time for the search.  The reporters were waiting
for me, and I had to go in front of the cameras again.

I haven't any idea what I said, and fortunately one of the port
officials soon rescued me.  There were the inevitable forms to be
filled.  I was weighed very carefully and given some pills to swallow
(they made sure that I did, too), abd then we climbed aboard a little
truck that would take us out to the launching site.  I was the only
passenger on this trip, as the rocket on which I was traveling was
really a freight en

Most spaceships, naturally enough, have astronomical names.  I was
flying on the Sirius, and though she was one of the smaller ships, she
looked impressive enough as we came up to her.  She had already been
raised in her sup porting cradle so that her prow pointed vertically at
the sky, and she seemed to be balanced on the great triangles o .  f
her wings.  These would come into action only when she,  glided back
into the atmosphere on her return to earth; at the moment they served
merely as supports for the four huge fuel tanks, like giant bombs,
which would be jettisoned as soon as the motors had drained them dry.
These streamlined tanks were nearly as large as the ship's hull
itself.

The servicing gantry was stiff in position, and as I stepped into the
elevator I realized for the first' time that I had now cut myself off
from earth.  A motor began to whine, and the metal walls of the Sidus
slid swiftly past My view of Port Goddard widened.  Now I could see all
the administrative buildings clustering at the edge of the plateau, the
great fuel storage tanks, the strange machinery of the liquid ozone
plant, the airfield with its everyday jets and helicopters.  And beyond
all these, quite unchanged by everything that man had done, the eternal
mountains and forests.

The elevator came gently to a halt, and the gates opened on to a short
gangway leading into the Sbius.  I walked across it, through the open
seals ' of the air lock, and the brilliant tropical sunlight gave way
to the cold electric glare of the ship's control room.

The pilot was already in his seat, going through the routine checks. He
swiveled round as I entered and gave me a cheerful grin.

"So you're the famous Roy Malcolm, and you?  rU try and get you to the
station in one piece.  Have you flown in a rocket beforer' No I
replied.  ""Iben don't worry.  It's not as bad as some people pretend.
Make yourself comfortable in that seat, fasten the straps, and just
relax.  We've still got twenty minutes before take~."

I climbed into the pneumatic couch, but it wasn't easy to relax.  I
don't think I was frightened, but I was certainly excited.  After all
these years of dreaming, I was really aboard a spaceship at lastl In a
few minutes, more than a hundred million horsepower would be hurtling
me up into the sky.

I let my eyes roam around the control cabin.  Most of its contents were
quite familiar from photographs and films, and I -knew what all the
instruments were supposed to do.  The control panel of a spaceship is
not really very complicated because so much is done automatically.

The pilot was talking to the Port Control Tower over the radio, as they
went through the pre-take-off routine together.  Every so often a
time-check broke through the conversations: "Minus fifteen minutes .. .
Minus ten minutes ... Minus five minutes."  Though I'd heard this sort
of thing so often before, it never fails to give me a thrill.  And this
time I wasn!t watching it on TV-I was in the middle of it myself.

At last the pilot said "Over to.  Automatic' and threw a large red
switch.

He gave a sigh of relief, stretched his arms, and leaned back in his
seat.

"That's always a nice feeling," he said.  "No more work for the next
hour!"

He didn't really mean that, of course.  Although the robot controls
would handle the ship from now on, he still had to see that everything
was going according to plan.  In an emergency, or if the robot pilot
made an error, he would have to take over again.

The ship began to vibrate as the fuel pumps started to spin.  A
complicated pattern of intersecting lines had appeared on the TV
screen, having something to do, I supposed, with the course the rocket
was to follow.  A row of tiny lights changed, one after another, from
red to green.  As the last light turned color, the pilot called to me
swiftly, "Make sure you're lying quite flat."

I snuggled down into the couch and then, without any warning, felt as
if someone bad jumped on top of me.  There was a tremendous roaring in
my ears, and I seemed to weigh a ton.  It required a definite effort to
breathe; this was no longer something you could leave to your lungs and
forget all about.

The feeling of discomfort lasted only a few seconds, then I grew
accustomed to it.  The ship's own motors had not yet started, and we
were climbing under the thrust of the booster rockets, which would burn
out and drop away after thirty seconds, when we were already many miles
above the earth.

I could tell when this time came by the sudden slackening of weight. It
lasted only a moment, then there was a subtly changed roaring as our
own rockets started to fire.  They would keep up their thunder for
another five minutes.  At the end of that time, we' would be moving so
swiftly that the earth could never drag us back.

The thrust of the rockets was now giving me mQre than three times my
normal weight.  As long as I stayed still, there was no real
discomfort.  As an experiment, I tried to see if I could raise my arm.
It was very tiring, but not too difficult.  Still, I was glad to let it
drop back again.  if necessary, I think I could have sat upright, but
standing would have been quite impossible.

On the 7V screen, the pattern of bright lines seemed unaltered.  Now,
however, there was a tiny spot creeping slowly upward-4epresenting, I
supposed, the ascending ship.  I watched it intently, wondering if the
motors would cut out when the spot reached the top of the screen.

Long before that happened, there came a series of short explosions, and
the ship shuddered slightly For one anxious moment, I thought that
something had gone wrong.  Then I realized what had happened: our drop
tanks had been emptied, and the bolts holding them on had been severed.
7bey were falling back behind us, and presently would plunge into the
Pacific, somewhere in the great empty wastes between Talutt and South
America.

At last the thunder of the rockets began to lose its power, and the
feeling of enormous weight ebbed away.  The ship was easing itself into
its final orbit, five hundred miles above the Equator.  he motors had
done their work and were now merely making the last adjustments to our
course.

Silence returned as the rockets cut out completely.  I could still feel
the faint vibration of the fuel pumps as they idled to rest, but there
was no sound whatsoever in the little cabin.  My cars had been
partially numbed by the

Mar of the rockets, and it took some minutes before I could hear
properly again.

The pilot finished checking his *mistruments and then released himself
from his seat I watched him, fascinated, as he floated across to me.

"It will take you some time to get used to this, he said, 88 he
unbuckled my safety strap.  "The thing to remember is--always move
gently.  And never let go of one hand hold until you've decided on the
next."

Gingerly, I stood up.  I grabbed the couch just in time to stop myself
from zooming to the ceiling.  Only, of course, It wasntt really the
ceiling any more.  "Up" and "down!"  had vanished completely.  Weight
had ceased to exist, and I had only to give myself a gentle push and
move any way I wished.

It's a strange thing, but even now there are people who don't
understand this business of "weightlessness."  They seem to think ifs
something to do with being "outside the pull of gravity."  That's
nonsense, of course.  In a space station or a coasting rocket five
hundred miles up, gravity is nearly as powerful as it is down on the
earth.  The reason why you feel weightless is not because you're
outside gravity, but because you're no longer resisting its Pull.  You
could feel weightless, even down on earth, inside a freely falling
elevator-as long as the fall lasted.  An orbiting space station or
rocket is in a kind of permanent fall-a "fall" that can last forever
because it isn't toward the earth but around it.

"Careful, now!"  warned the pilot.  "I don7t want you cracking your
head against my instrument panel!  If you want to have a look out of
the window, hang on to this strap."  I obeyed him, and peered through
the little porthole, whose thick plastic was all that lay between me
and nothingness.

Yes, I know that there have been so many films and photographs that
everyone knows just what earth looks like from space.  So I won't waste
much time describing it.  And to tell the truth, there wasn't a great
deal to see, as my field of view was almost entirely filled by the
Pacific ocean.

Beneath me it was a surprisingly deep azure, which softened into a
misty blue at the limits of vision.  I asked the pilot bow far away the
horizon was.  "About two thousand miles," he replied.  "You can see
most of the way down to New Zealand and up to Fla waiL Quite a view,
isn't it?"

Now that I had grown accustomed to the scale, I was able to pick out
some of the Pacific islands, many showing their coral reefs quite.
clearly.  A long way toward what I imagined was the west, the color of
the ocean changed quite abruptly from blue to a vivid green.  I
realized I was looking at the enormous floating sea-farms that fed the
continent of Asia, and which now covered a substantial part of all the
oceans in the tropics.

The coast of South America was coming into sight when the pilot began
to prepare for the landing on the Inner Station.  (I know the word
"landing" sounds peculiar, but it's the expression that's used.  Out in
space, many ordinary words have quite different meanings.) I was stiff
staring out of the little porthole when I got the order to go back to
my seat, so that I wouldn't fall around the cabin during the final
maneuvers.

The TV screen was now a black rectangle, with a tiny double star
shining near its center.  We were about a him dred' miles away from the
station, slowly overhauling it.

The two stars grew brighter and far the i r apart: additional faint
satellites appeared sprinkled around them.  I knew I was seeing the
ships that were "in dock" at the moment, being refueled or
overhauled.

Suddenly one of those faint stars burst into blazing light.  A hundred
miles ahead of us, one of the ships in that little fleet had started
its motors and was pulling away from earth.  I questioned the pilot.

"That would be the Alpha Centauri, bound for Venus," he replied. "She's
a wonderful old wreck, but it's really time they pensioned her off. 
Now let me get on with my navigating.  This is one job the robots can't
do."

The Inner Station was only a few miles away when we started to put on
the brakes.  There was a high-pitched whistling from the steering jets
in the nose, and for a moment a feeble sensation of weight returned. it
lasted only a few seconds; then we had matched speeds and joined the
station's other floating satellites.  Being careful to ask the pilots
permission, I got out of my couch and went to the window again.  The
earth was now on the other side of the ship, and I was looking out at
the stars and the Space Station.  It was such a staggering sight that I
had to stare for a minute before it made any sense at all.  I
understood, now, the purpose of that orientation test the doctors had
given me.

My first impression of the Inner Station was one of complete chaos.

Floating there in space about a mile away from our ship was a great
open latticework of spidery girders, in the shape of a flat disk.  Here
and there on its surface were spherical buildings of varying sizes,
connected to each other by tubes wide enough for men to travel through.
In the center of the disk was the largest sphere of all, dotted with
the tiny eyes of portholes and with dozens of radio antennae jutting
from it in all directions.

Several spaceships, some almost completely dismantled, were attached to
the great disk at various points.  They looked, I thought, very much
like flies caught in a spiderweb.  Men in space suits were working on
them, and sometimes the-glare of a welding torch -would dazzle my eyes
Other ships were floating freely, arranged in no particular system that
I could discover, in the space around the station.  Some of them were
streamlined, winged vessels like the one that had brought me up from
earth.

Others were the true ships of space-assembled here outside the
atmosphere and designed to ferry loads from world to world without ever
landing on any planet.  They were weird, flimsy constructions, usually
with a pressurized spherical chamber for the crew and passengers, and
larger tanks for the fuel.  There was no streamlining of course: the
cabins, fuel tanks and motors were simply linked together by thin
struts.  As I looked at these ships I couldn't help thinking of some
very old magazines I'd once seen which showed our grandfather's idea of
spaceships.  They were all sleek, finned projectiles looking rather
like bombs.  The artists who drew those pictures would have been
shocked by the reality: in fact they would probably not have recognized
these queer objects as spaceships at all.

I was wondering how we were going to get aboard the station when
something came sweeping into my field of vision.  It was a tiny
cylinder, just big enough to hold a man-and it did hold a man, for I
could see his head through the plastic panels covering one end of the
device.  Long, jointed arms projected from the machine's body, and it
was trailing a thin cable behind it.  I could just make out the faint,
misty jet to the tiny rocket motor which propelled this miniature
spaceship.

The operator must have seen me staring out at him, for he grinned back
as he Bashed by.  A minute.  later there came an alarming "clang" from
the hull of our ship.  The pilot laughed at my obvious fright.

"That's only the towing cable being coupled.  It's magnetic, you know.
"We'll start to move in a minute."

There was the feeblest of tugs, and our ship slowly rotated until it
was parallel to the great disk of the station.  The cable had been
attached amidships, and the station was hauling us in like in angler
landing a fish.

The pilot pressed the button on the control panel, and there was the
whining of motors as our undercarriage lowered itself.  That was not
something you'd expect to see used in space, but the idea was sensible
enough.  The shock absorbers were just the thing to take up the gentle
impact on making contact with the station.

We were wound in so slowly that it took almost ten minutes to make the
short journey.  Then there was a slight jar as we "touched down," and
the journey was over.  ~

"Well," grinned the pilot, "I hope you enjoyed the trip.  Or would you
have liked some excitement?"

I looked at him cautiously, wondering if he was pulling my leg.

"It was quite exciting enough, thank you.  What other sort of
excitement could you supply?"

"Well, what about a few meteors, an attack by pirates, an invasion from
outer space, or all the other things you read about in the fiction
magazines?"

"I only read the serious books, like Richardson's Introduction to

Astronautics, or Maxwell's Modern Spaceships -not magazine stories."

"I don't believe you," he replied promptly.  "I read 'era, anyway, and
I'm sure you do.  You can't fool me."

He was right, of course.  It was one of the first lessons I learned on
the station.  All the people out there have been hand-picked for
intelligence as well as technical knowledge.  If you weren't on the
level, they'd spot it right away.

I was wondering how we were going to get out of the ship when there was
a series of hangings and scrapings from the air lock, followed a moment
later by an alarming hiss of air.  It slowly died away, and presently,
with a soft sucking noise, the inner door of the lock swung open.  ,
"Remember what

I told you about moving slowly," said the pilot, gathering up his log
book.

"The best thing is for you to hitch on to my belt and I'll tow you.
Ready?"

I couldn't help thinking it wasn't a very dignified entry into the
station.

But it was safest to take no risks, so that was the way I traveled
through the flexible, pressurized coupling that had been clamped on to
the side of our ship.  The pilot launched himself with a powerful kick,
and I traHed along behind him.  It was rather like learning to swim
underwater, so much like it, in fact, that at first I had the panicky
feeling that I'd drown if I tried to breathe.

Presently we emerged into a wide metal tunnel, one of the station's
main passageways, I guessed.  Cables and pipes ran along the walls, and
at intervals we passed through great double doors with red EMERGENCY
notices painted on them.  I didn't,think this was at all reassuring. 
We met only two people on our journey.  They flashed by us with an
effortless ease that filled me with envy, and made me determined to be
just as skillful before I left the station.

"I'm taking you to Commander Doyle," the pilot explained to me.  "He's
in charge of training here and will be keeping an eye on you."

"What sort of man is be?"  I asked anxiously.

"Don't you worry-you'll find out soon enough.  Here we are.99

We drifted to a halt in front of a circular door carrying the notice:
"Cdr.

R. Doyle, i/c Training.  Knock and Enter."  he pilot knocked and
entered, still towing me behind him like a sack of potatoes.

I heard him say: "Captain Jones reporting, Mr.  Doyle -with passenger."
Then he shoved me in front of him and I saw the man he had been
addressing.

He was sitting at a. perfectly ordinary office desk, which was rather
surprising in this place where nothing else seemed normal.  And he
looked like a prize fighter.  I think he was the most powerfiffly built
man I'd ever seen.  Two huge arms covered most of the desk in front of
him, and I wondered where he found clothes to fit, for his shoulders
must have been over four feet across.

At first I didn't see his face clearly, for he was bending over some
papers.  Then be looked up, and I found myself staring at a huge red
beard and two enormous eyebrows.  It was some time before I really took
in the rest of the face.  It is so unusual to see a real beard nowadays
that I couldn't help staring at it.  Then I realized that Commander
Doyle must have had some kind of accident, for there was a faint scar
running diagonally right across his forehead.  Considering how skilled
our plastic surgeons are nowadays, the fact that it was still visible
meant that the original injury must have been very serious.

Altogether, as you'll probably have gathered, Commander Doyle wasn't a
very handsome man.  But he was certainly a striking one, and my biggest
surprise was still to come.

"So you're young Malcom, eh?"  he said, in a plea san4

quiet voice.  that wasn't half as fearsome as his appearance.  "We've
beard a great deal about you.  O.K."  Captain Jones-I'll take charge of
him now."  "The pilot saluted and glided away.  For the next ten
minutes Commander

Doyle questioned me closely, building up a picture of my life and
interests.  I told him I'd been born in New Zealand and had lived for a
few years in China, South Africa, Brazil and Switzerland, as my
father-who is a journalist-moved from one job to another.  We'd gone to
Missouri because

Mom was fed up with mountains and wanted a change.  As families go'
these days, we hadn't traveled a great deal, and I'd never visited half
the places all our neighbors seemed to know.  Perhaps that was one
reason why I wanted to go out into space.

When he had finished writing all this down, and adding many notes that
I'd have given a good deal to read, Commander Doyle laid aside the
old-fashioned fountain pen he was using and stared at me for a minute
as if

I was some peculiar animal.  He drummed thoughtfully on the desk with
his huge fingers, which looked as if they could tear their way through
the material without much trouble.  I was feeling a bit scared, and to
make matters worse I'd drifted away from the floor and was floating
helplessly in mid-air again.  There was no way I could move anywhere
unless I made myself ridiculous by trying to swim, which might or might
not work.  Then the commander gave a chuckle, and his face crinkled up
into a vast grin.

"I think this may be quite amusing," he said.  While I was still
wondering if I dared to ask why, he continued, after glancing at some
charts on the wall behind him: "Afternoon classes have just stopped.
I'll take you to meet the boys."  Then he grabbed a long metal tube
that must have been slung underneath the desk, and launched himself out
of his chair with a single jerk of his huge arm.

He m6vcd so quickly that it took me completely by surprise.  A moment
later

I just managed to stifle a gasp of amazement.  For ashe moved clear of
the desk, I saw that Commander Doyle had no legs.

When you go to a new school or move' into a strange district, thete's
always a confusing period so fall of new experiences that yoi~ can
never recall it clearly.  My first day on the Space Station was like
that So much had never happened to me before in such a short time.  It
was not merely that I was meeting a lot of new people.

I had to learn how to live all over again.

At first I felt as helpless as a baby.  I couldn't judge the effort
needed to make any movement.  Although weight had vanished, momentum
remained.  It required force to start something moving and more force
to stop -it a

That was where the broomsticks came in.

Commander Doyle had invented them, and the name, of course, came from
the old idea that once upon a time witches used to ride on broomsticks.
We certainly rode around the station on ours.  They consisted of one
hollow tube sliding inside another.  The two were connected by a
powerful spring, one tube ending in a hook, the other in a wide rubber
pad.  That was all there was to it.  If you wanted to move, you put~
the pad against the nearest wall and shoved.  The recoil launched you
into space, and when you arrived at your destination you let the spring
absorb your velocity and so bring you to rest.  Trying to stop yourself
with your bare hands was liable to result in sprained wrists.

It wasn't quite as easy as it sounds, though, for if you weren't
careful you could bounce right back the way you'd come.

It was a long time before I discovered what had happened to the
commanden'The scar he'd picked up in an ordinary motor crash when he
was a young man, but the more serious accident was a different story,
having occurred when he was on the first expedition to Mercury.  He'd
been quite an athlete, it seemed, so the loss of his legs must have
been an even bigger blow to him than to most men.  It was obvious why
he had come to the station it was the only place where he wouldn't be a
cripple.  Indied, thanks to his powerfully developed arms, he WaS
probably the most agile man in the station.  He had lived here for the
last ten years and would never return to earth, where he would be
helpless again.  He wouldn7t even go over to any of the other space
stations where they had gravity, and no one was ever tactless or
foolish enough to suggest such a trip to him.

There were about a hundred people on board the Inner Station, ten of
them apprentices a few years older than myself.  At first they were a
bit fed up at having me around, but after I'd had my fight with Ronnie
Jordan everything was O.K."  and they accepted me as one of the family.
III tell you about that later.

The senior apprentice was a tall, quiet Canadian named Tim Benton.  He
never said much, but when he did speak everyone took notice.  It was
Tim who really taught me my way around the Inner Station, after
Commander Doyle had handed me over to him with a few words of
explanation.

"I suppose you know what we do up here?"  he said doubtfully when the
commander had left us.

"You refuel spaceships on their way out from earth, and carry out
repairs and overhauls."

"Yes, that's our main job.  The other stations--those farther out-have
many other duties, but we needn't bother about that now.  lberes one
important point I'd better make clear right away.  This Inner Station
of ours is really in two parts, with a couple of miles between them.
Come and have a look."

He pulled me over to a port and I stared out into space.  Hanging there
against the stars, so close that it seemed I could reach out and touch
it, was what seemed to be a giant flywheel.  It was slowly turning on
its axis, and as it revolved I could see the glitter of sunlight on its
observation ports.  I could not help comparing its smooth compactness
with the flimsy, open girder work of the station in which I was
standing-or, rather, floating.  he great wheel had an axle, for jutting
from its center was a long, narrow cyli rider which ended in a curious
structure I couldn't understand.  A spaceship was slowly. manuevering
near it.

"That's the Residential Station," said Benton disapprovingly.  "It's
nothing but a hotel.  You've noticed that it's spinning.  Because of
that, it's got normal earth gravity at the rim, owing to centrifugal
force.  We seldom go.  over there; once you've got used to
weightlessness, gravity's a nuisance.  But all incoming passengers from
Mars and the moon are transshipped there.  It wouldn't be safe for them
to go straight to earth after living in a much lower gravity field.  In
the Residential Station they can get acclimatized, as it were.  They go
in at the center', where there's no gravity, and work slowly out to the
rim, where it's earth normal."

"How do they get aboard if the thing's spinning?"  I asked.

"See that ship moving into position?  If you look carefully, you'll see
that the axle of the station isn't spinning; it's being driven by a
motor against the station's spin so that it actually stands still in
space.  The ship can couple up to it and transfer passengers.  the
coupling's free to rotate, and once the axle revs up to match speed
with the station, the passengers can go aboard.  Sounds complicated,
but it works well.  And see if you can think of a better way!"

"Will I have a chance to go over there?"  I asked.

"I expect it could be arranged-though I don't see much point in it. You
might just as well be down on earth.  That's the idea of the place, in
fact."

I didn't press the point, and it wasn't until the very end of my visit
that

I was able to get -Over to the Residential Station, floating there only
a couple of miles away.

It must have been quite a bother showing me around the station, because
I had to be pushed or pulled most of the way until I'd found my "space
legs."

Once or twice Tim just managed to rescue me in time when I'd launched
myself too vigorously and was about to plunge headlong into an
obstacle.

But he was very patient, and finally I

got the knack of things and was able to move around fairly
confidently.

It was several days before I really knew my way around the great maze
of interconnecting corridors and pressure chambers that was the Inner
Station.

In that first trip I merely had a quick survey of its workshops, radio
equipment, power plant, air-conditioning gear, dormitories, storage
tanks and observatory.  Sometimes it was hard to believe that all this
had been carried up into space and assembled here five hundred miles
above the earth.  I didn't know, until Tim mentioned it casually, that
most of the material in the station had actually come from the moon.
The moon's low gravity made it much more economical to ship equipment
from there instead of from the earth, despite the fact that earth was
so much closer.

My first tour of inspection ended inside one of the air locks.  We
stood in front of the great circular door, resting snugly on its rubber
gaskets, which led into the outer emptiness.  Clamped to the walls
around us were the space suits, and I looked at them longingly.  It had
always been one of my ambitions to wear one and to become a tiny,
self-contained world of my own.

"Do you think I'll have a chance of trying one on while I'm here?"  I
asked.

run looked thoughtful; then he glanced at his watch.

"I'm not on duty for half an hour, and I want to collect something I've
left out at the rim.  We'll go outside."

"But .. ."  I gulped, my enthusiasm suddenly waning.  "Will it be
safe?

Doesn't it take a lot of training to use one of these?"

He looked at me calmly.  "Not frightened, are you?"

"Of course not."

"Well, let's get started."

Tim answered my question while he was showing me how to get into the
suit.

"It's quite true that it takes a lot of training before you can operate
one of these.  I'm not going to let you try.  You sit tight inside and
tag along with me.  You'll be, as safe there as you are now, as long as
you don't meddle with the controls.  Just to make sure, I'll lock them
first."

I rather resented this, but didn't say anything.  After all, he was the
boss.

To most people, the word "space suit'!  conjures up a Picture of
something like a diving dress, in which a an can walk and use his arms.
Such suits are, of course, used on places Eke the moon.  But on a space
station, where there's no gravity, your legs aren't much use anyway,
because outside you have to blow yourself round with tiny rocket
units.

For this reason, the lower part of the suit was simply a rigid
cylinder.

When I climbed.  inside it, I found that I could use my feet only to
work some control pedals, which I was careful not to touch.  There was
a little seat, and a transparent dome covering the top of the cylinder
gave me good visibility.  I could use my hands and arms.  Just below my
chin there was a neat little control panel with a tiny keyboard and a
few meters.  If I wanted to handle anything outside, there were
flexible sleeves through which'I could push my arms.  They ended in
gloves which, although they seemed clumsy, enabled one to carry out
quite delicate operations.

Tim threw some of the switches on my suit and clamped the transparent
dome over my head.  I felt rather like being inside a coffin with a
view.  Then he chose a suit for himself and attached it to mine by a
thin nylon cord.

The inner door of the air lock thudded shut behind us, and I could hear
the vibration of the pumps as the air was sucked back into the station.
The sleeves of my suit began to stiffen slightly.  Tim called across at
me, his voice distorted after passing through our bel mets

"I won't switch on the radio yet.  You should still be able to bear
me.

Listen to this."  Then he went over to the familiar radio engineer's
routine: "Testing, One, Two, Three, Four, Five..."

Around "Five" his voice began to fade.  When he'd reached "Nine" I
couldn't hear a thing, though his lips were still moving.  There was no
longer enough air around us to carry sound.  The silence was quite
uncanny, and I

was relieved when talk came through the loud-speaker in my suit.

"I'm opening the outer door now.  Don't make any movements-I'll do all
that's necessary."

In that eerie silence, the great door slowly opened inward.  I was
floating freely now, and I felt a faint "tag" as the last traces of air
puffed out into space.  A circle of stars was ahead of me, and I could
just glimpse the misty rim of earth to one side.

"Ready?"  asked Tim.

"O.K.," I said, hoping that the microphone wouldn't betray my
nervousness.

The towing line gave a tug as Tim switched on his jets, and we drifted
out of the air lock.  It was a terrifying sensation, yet one I would
not have missed for anything.  Although, of course, the words "up" and
"down" had no meaning here, it seemed to me as if I were floating out
through a hole in a great metal wall, with the earth at an immense
distance below.  My reason told me that I was perfectly safe, but all
my instincts shouted, "You've a five-hundred-mile fall straight down
beneath youl"

Indeed, when the earth filled half the sky, it was hard not to think of
it as "down."  We were in sunlight at the moment, passing across
Africa, and I could see Lake Victoria and the great forests of the
Congo.  What would

Livingstone and Stanley have thought, I wondered, if they had known
that one day men would Bash across the Dark Continent at 18,000 miles
an hour?

And the day of those great explorers was only two hundred years behind
us.

It had been a crowded couple of centuries..  *

Though it was fascinating to look at e", I found it was making me
giddy, and so I swiveled round in my suit to concentrate on the
station.  Tim had now towed us well clear of it, and we were almost out
among the halo of floating ships.  I tried to forget about the earth,
and now that I could no longer see it, it seemed natural enough to
think of "down " as toward the station.

This is a knack everyone has to learn in space.  You're liable to get
awfully confused unless you pretend that somewhere is down.  The
important thing is to choose the most convenient direction, according
to whatever you hap.  pen to be doing at the moment.

Tim had given us enough speed to make our little trip in a reasonable
time, so he cut the jets and pointed out the sights as we drifted
along.  This bird's-eye view of the station completed the picture Id
already got from my tour inside, and I began to feel that I was really
learning my way about.

The outer rim of the station was simply a flat web work of girders
trailing off into space.  Here and there were large cylinders,
pressurized workshops big enough to hold two or three men, and intended
for any jobs that couldn't be handled in vacuum.

A spice ship with most of its plating stripped off was floating near
the edge of the station, secured from drifting away by a couple of
cords that would hardly have supported a man on earth.  Several
mechanics wearing suits like our own were working on the huff.  I
wished I could overhear their conversation and find what they were
doing, but we were on a different wave length.

"I'm going to leave you here a minute," said Tim, unfastening the
towing cord and clipping it to the nearest girder.  "Don't do anything
until I get back."

I felt rather foolish,.  floating around like a captive balloon, and
was glad that no one took any notice of me.  While waiting, I
experimented with the fingers of my suit, pd tried, unsuccessfully, to
tie a simple knot in my towing cable.  I found later that one could do
this sort of thing, but it took practice.  Certainly the men on the
spaceship seemed to be handling their tools without any awkwardness,
despite their gloves.

Suddenly it began to grow dark.  Until this moment, the station and the
ships floating beside it had been bathed in brilliant light from a sun
so fierce that I had not dared to look anywhere near it.  But now the
sun was passing behind the earth as we hurtled across the night side of
the planet.

I turned my head, and there was a sight so splendid that it completely
took away my breath.  Earth was now a huge, black disk eclipsing the
stars, but all along one edge was a glorious crescent of golden light,
shrinking even as I watched.  I was looking back upon the line of the
sunset, stretching for a thousand miles across Africa.  At its center
was a great halo of dazzling gold, where a thin sliver of sun was still
visible.  It dwindled and vanished; the crimson afterglow of the sunset
contracted swiftly along the horizon until it too disappeared.  The
whole thing lasted not more than two minutes, and the men working
around me took not the slightest notice of it.  After all, in time one
gets used even to the most wonderful sights, and the station circled
the earth so swiftly that sunset occurred 'every hundred minutes.

It was not completely dark~ for the moon was half fulL looking no
brighter or closer than it did from earth.  And the sky was so crowded
with millions of stars, all shining without a trace of twinkling, that
I wondered how anyone could ever have spoken of the "blackness" of
space.

I was so busy looking for the other planets (and failing to find them)
that

I never noticed This return until my towrope began to tag.  Slowly we
moved back toward the center of the station, and in such utter silence
that it hardly seemed real.  I closed my eyes for a minute, but the
scene hadn!t changed when I opened them.  There was the great black
shield of earth-no, not quite black, for I could see the oceans
glimmering in the moonlight The same light made the slim girders around
me gleam like the threads of a ghostly spiders web, a web sprinkled
with myriads of stars.

This was the moment when I really knew that I had reached space at
last, and that nothing else could ever be the same again.

 3 THE MORNING STAR

'74ow ON STATION Four, do You know what our biggest trouble used to
be?"  asked Norman Powell.

"NO," I replied, which was what I was supposed to say.

"Alice," he exclaimed solemnly.  Believe it or not!  Some of them got
loose from the biology labs, and before you knew where You were, they
were all over the place.99

"I don't believe a word Of it," interrupted Ronnie Jordan.

"They were so small they could get into all the air shafts,"
continued

Norman, unabashed.  "You could hear them scuttling around happily
whenever you put your ear to the walls.  There was no need for them to
make holes-every- room had half a dozen already provided, and You can
guess what they did to the ventilation.  But we got them in the end,
and do you know how we did it?"

"You borrowed a couple of cats."

Norman gave Ronnie a superior look.

"That was tried, but cats don't like zero gravity.  They were no good
at all; the mice used to laugh at them.  No; we used owls.  You should
have seen them flyl Their wings worked Just as well as ever, of course,
and they used to do the most fantastic things.  It took them only a few
months to get rid of the mice."

He sighed.

"The problem then, of course, was to get rid of the owls.  We did this
.."

I never learned what happened next, for the rest of the gang decided
they'd had enough of Norman's tall stories and everybody launched at
him simultaneously.  He disappeared in the middle of a slowly revolving
sphere of bodies that drifted noisily around the cabin.  Only rim
Benton, who never got mixed up in these vulgar brawls, remained quietly
studying, which was what everybody else was supposed to be doing.

Every day all the apprentices met in the classroom to hear a lecture
by

Commander Doyle or one of the statiOn's technical officers.  he
commander had suggested that I attend these talks, and a sugestion from
him was not very different from an order He thought that I might pick
up some useful knowledge, which was true enough.  I could understand
about a quarter of what was said, and spent the rest of the time
reading something from the station's library of ultra-lightweight
books.

After the classes there was a thirty-minute study period, and from time
to time some studying was actually done.  These intervals were much
more useful to me than the IlessOns themselves, for the boys were
always talking about their jobs and the things they had seen in space.
Some of them had been out here for two years, with only a few short
trips down to earth.

Of course, a lot of the tales they told me were, shall I say, slightly
exaggerated.  Norman Powell, our prize humorist, was always trying to
pull my leg.  At first I fell for some of his yarns, but later I
learned to be more cautious.

There were also, I'd discovered, some interesting tricks and practical
jokes that could be played in space.  One of the best involved nothing
more complicated than an ordinary match.  We were in the classroom one
afternooni when Norman suddenly turned to me and said, "Do you know how
to test the air to see if it's breathable?"

"If it wasn't, I suppose you'd soon know," I replied.

"Not at all-you might be knocked out too quickly to do anything about
it.

But there's a simple test which has been used on earth for ages, in
mines and caves.  You just carry a flame ahead of you, and if it goes
out-well, you go out too, as quickly as you can!"

He fumbled in his pocket and extracted a box of matches.  I was mildly
surprised to see something so oldfashioned aboard the station.  -"In
here, of course," Norman continued, "a flame win burn properly.  But if
the air was bad it would go out at once

He absent-mindedly struck a match on the box, and it burst into light.
A flame formed-around the head, and I leaned forward to look at it
closely.

It was a very odd flame, not long and pointed but quite spherical. Even
as

I watched, it dwindled and died.

It's funny how the mind works, for up to thatsmoment I'd been breathing
comfortably, yet now.  I seemed to be suffocating.  I looked at Norman,
and said nervously, "Try it again-there must be something wrong with
the match."

Obediently he struck another, which expired as quickly as the first.

"Let's get out of here," I gasped.  "The air purifier must have packed
up."

Then I saw that the others were grinning at me.

"Don't panic, Roy," said Tim.  "There's a simple answer."  He grabbed
the matchbox from Norman.

"The air's perfectly OX But if you think about it, you'll see that it's
impossible for a flame to burn out here.

Since there's no gravity and everything stays put, the smoke doesn't
rise and the flame just chokes itself.  The only way it will keep
burning is if you do this."

He struck another match, but instead of holding it still, kept it
moving slowly through the air.  It left a trail of smoke behind it, and
kept on burning until only the stump was left.

"It was entering fresh air all the time," Tim continued.  "So it didn't
choke itself with burnt gases.  And if you think this is just an
amusing trick of no practical importance, you're wrong.  It means we've
got to keep the air in the station on the move otherwise we'd soon go
the same way as that flame.  Wo;;i~, will you switch on the ventilators
again, now that you've had your little joke?"

Joke or not, it was a very effective lesson.  But it made me all the
more determined that one of these days I was going to get my own back
on Norman.

Not that I disliked him, but I was getting a little tired of his sense
of humor.

Someone gave a shout from the other side of the room.

"The Canopus is leaving!"

We all rushed to the small circular windows and looked out into space.
It was some time before I could manage to see- anything, but presently
I wormed my way to the front and pressed my face against the thick
transparent plastic.

The Canopus was the largest liner on the Mars run, and she had been
here for some weeks having her routine overhaul.  During the last two
days fuel and passengers had been going aboard, and she had now drifted
away from the station until we were separated by a space of several
miles.  Like the

Residential Station, the Canopus slowly revolved to give the passengers
a sense of gravity.  She was shaped rather like a giant doughnut, the
cabins and living quarters forming a ring around the power plant and
drive units.

During the voyage the ships spin would be gradually reduced, so that by
the time her passengers reached Mars they would already be accustomed
to the right gravity.  On the homeward journey, just the reverse would
happen.

The departure of a spaceship from an orbit is not nearly so spectacular
as a take-off from earth.  It all happens in utter silence, of course,
and it also happens very slowly.  Nor is there any flame and smoke. All
that I could see was a faint pencil of mist jetting from the drive
units.  The great radiator fins began to glow cherry red, then white
hot, as the waste heat from the power plant flooded away into space.
The liner's thousands of tons were gradually picking up speed, though
it would be many hours before she gained enough velocity to escape from
earth.  The rocket that had carried me up to the station had traveled
at a hundred times the acceleration of the Canopus, but the great liner
could keep her drive units thrusting gently for weeks on end, to build
up a final speed of almost half a million miles an hour.

After five minutes, she was several miles away and moving at an
appreciable velocity, pulling out away from our own orbit into the path
leading to

Mars.  I stared hungrily after her, wondering when I too would travel
on such a journey.  Norman must have seen my expression, for he
chuckled and said:

"Thinking of stowing away on the next ship?  Well, forget it.  It can't
be done.  Oh, I know it's a favorite dodge in fiction, but it has never
happened in practice.  There are too many safeguards.  And do you know
what theyd do to a stowaway if they did find one?"

"No," I said, trying not to show too much interest-for to tell the
truth I had been thinking along these lines.

Norman rubbed his hand ghoulishly.  "Well, an extra person on board
would mean that much less food and oxygen for everyone else, and it
would upset the fuel calculations too.  So he'd simply be pushed
overboard."

"Then it's just as well that no one ever has stowed away."

"It certainly is-but of course a stowaway wouldn't have a chance.  He'd
be spotted before the voyage began.  There just isn't room to hide in a
spaceship."

I filed this information away for future reference.  It might come in
handy someday.

Space Station One was a big place, but the apprentices didn't spend all
their time aboard it, as I quickly found out.  They had a club room
which must have been unique, and it was some time before I was allowed
to visit it.

Not far from the station was a veritable museum of astronautics, a
floating graveyard of ships that had seen their day and been withdrawn
from service.

Most of them had been stripped of their instruments and were no more
than skeletons.  On earth, of course, they would have rusted away long
ago, but here in vacuum they would remain bright and untarnished
forever.

Among these derelicts were some of the great pioneers -the first ship
to land on Venus, the first to reach the satellites of Jupiter, the
first to circle Saturn.  At the end of their long voyages, they had
entered the five-hundred.  mile orbit round.  earth and the ferry
rockets had come up to take off their crews.  They were still here
where they had been abandoned, never to be used again.

All, that is, except the Morning Star.  As everyone knows, she made the
first circumnavigation of Venus, back in 1985.  But very few people
know that she was still in an excellent state of repair, for the
apprentices had adopted her, made her their private headquarters, and,
for their own amusement, had got her into working condition again.
Indeed, they believed she was at least as good as new and were always
trying to "borrow" enough rocket fuel to make a short trip.  They were
very hurt because no one would let them have any.

Commander Doyle, of course, knew all about this and quite approved of
it.

After all, it was good training.  Sometimes he came over to the Morning
Star to see how things were getting on, but it was generally understood
that the ship was private property.  You had to have an invitation
before you were allowed aboard.  Not until I'd been around for some
days, and had become more or less accepted as one of the gang, did I
have a chance of making the trip over to the Morning Star.

It was the longest journey I had made outside, the station, for the
graveyard was about five miles away, moving in the same orbit as the
station but a little ahead of it.  I don't quite know how to describe
the curious vehicle in which we made the trip.  It had been constructed
out of junk salvaged from other ships, and was really nothing more than
a pressurized cylinder, large enough to hold a do ten people.  A
low-powered rocket unit had been bolted to one end, there were a few
auxiliary jets for steering, a simple air lock, a radio to keep in
touch with the station and that was all.  This peculiar vessel could
make the hop across to the Morning

Star in about ten minutes, being capable of achieving a top speed of
about thirty miles an hour.  She had been christened The Skylark of
Space, a name apparently taken from a famous old science fiction
story.

The Skylark was usually kept parked at the outer rim of the station,
where she wouldn't get in anybody's way.  When she was needed, a couple
of the apprentices would go out in space suits, loosen her mooring
lines, and tow her to the nearest air lock.  Then she would be coupled
up and you could go aboard through the connecting tube, just as if you
were entering a real space liner.

My first trip in the Skylark was a very different experience from the
climb up from earth.  She looked so ramshackle that I expected her to
fall to pieces at any moment, though in fact she had a perfectly
adequate margin of safety.  With ten of us aboard, her little cabin was
distinctly crowded, and when the rocket motor started up, the gentle
acceleration made us all drift slowly toward the rear of the ship.  The
thrust was so feeble that it made me weigh only about a pound, quite a
contrast to the takeoff weight from earth, where I could have sworn' I
weighed a ton!  After a minute or so of this leisurely progress, we
shut off the drive and drifted freely for another ten minutes, by which
time a further brief burst of power brought us neatly to rest at our
destination.

There was plenty of room inside the Morning Star, after all she had
been the home of five men for almost two years.

Their names were still there, scratched on the paint work in the
control cabin, and the sight of those signatures took my imagination
back almost a hundred years, to the great pioneering days of
spaceflight, when even the moon was a new world and no one had yet
reached any of the planets.

Despite the shies age, everything inside the control room' still seemed
bright and new.  The instrument board, as far as I could tell, might
have belonged to a ship of my own time.  Tim Benton stroked the panel
gently.  94M good as newl" he said, with obvious pride.  in his voice.
"I'd guarantee to take you to Venus any dayl"

I got to know the Morning Star controls pretty well.  It was safe to
play with them, of course, since the fuel tanks were empty and all that
happened when one pressed the "Main Drive-Firel" button was that a red
light lit up.

Still, it was exciting to sit in the pilot's seat and to daydream with
my hands on the controls.

A little workshop had been fitted up just aft of the main fuel tanks,
and a lot of model making went on here, as well as a good deal of
serious engineering.  Several of the apprentices had designed gadgets
they wanted to try out, and were seeing if they worked in practice
before they took them any farther.  Karl Hasse, our mathematical
genius, was trying to build some new form of navigational device, but
as he always hid it as soon as anybody came along, no one knew just
what it was supposed to do.

I learned more about spaceships while I was crawling around inside
the

Morning Star than I ever did from books or lectures.  It was true that
she was nearly a century old, but although the details have altered,
the main principles of spaceship design have changed less than one
might expect.  You still have to have pumps, fuel tanks, air Purifiers,
temperature regulators, and so on.  The gadgets may change, but the
jobs they must do remain the same.  *

The information I absorbed aboard the Morning Star was not merely
technical by any means.  I finished my training in weightlessness here,
and I also learned to fight in free-fall.

Which brings me to Ronnie Jordan.

Ronnie was the youngest of the apprentices, about two years older than
myself.  He was a boisterous, fairhaired Australian-at least, he'd been
born in Sydney but had spent most of his life in Europe.  As a result,
he spoke three or four languages, sometimes accidentally slip~ ping
from one to the other.

He was good-natured and lighthearted, and gave the impression that he'd
never quite got used to zero gravity but still regarded it as a great
joke.

At any rate, he was always trying out new tricks, such as making a pair
of wings and seeing how well he could fly with them.  (The answer
was-not very well.  But perhaps the wings weren't properly designed.)
Because of his high spirits, he was always getting into good-humored
fights with the other boys, and a fight under free-fall conditions is
fascinating to watch.

The first problem, of course, is to catch your opponent, which isn't
easy, because if he refused to cooperate, he can shoot off in so many
directions.

But even if he decides to play, there are further difficulties.  Any
kind of boxing is almost impossible, since the first blow would send
you flying apart.  So the only practicable form of combat is wrestling.
It usually starts with the two fighters floating in mid-air, as far as
possible from any solid object.  They grasp wrists, with their arms
fully extended; after that it's difficult to see exactly what happens.
The air is full of flying limbs and slowly rotating bodies.  By the
rules of the game, you've won if you can keep your opponent pinned
against any wall for a count of five.

This is much more difficult than it sounds, for he only has to -give a
good heave to send both of you flying out into the room again. Remember
that, since there's no gravity, you can't just sit on your victim until
your weight tires him out

My first fight with Ronnie arose out of a political argUment.  Perhaps
it seems funny that out in space earth's politics matter at all.  In a
way they don't, at least, no one worries whether you're a citizen of
the Atlantic

Federaration, the Panasiatic Union or the Pacific Confederacy But there
were plenty of arguments about which country was the best to live in,
and as most of us had traveled a good deal, each had different ideas.

When I told Ronnie that he was talking nonsense, he said, "Them's
fightin' words," and before I knew what had happened I was pinned in a
corner while

Norman Powell lazily counted up to ten to give me a chance.  I couldn't
escape, because Ronnie.  had his feet braced firmly against the other
two walls forming the corner of the cabin.  The next time I did
slightly better, but Ronnie still won easily.  Not only was he stronger
than I was, but I didn't have the technique.

In the end, however, I did succeed in winning-just once.  It took a lot
of careful planning, and maybe Ron had become overconfident as well.

I realized that if I let him get me in a corner I was done for.  He
could use his favorite "starfish" trick and pin me down, by bracing
himself against the walls where they came together.  On the other hand,
if I stayed out in the open, his superior strength and skill would soon
force me into an unfavorable position.  It was necessary, therefore, to
think of some way of neutralizing his advantages.

I thought about the problem a lot before discovering the answer, and
then

I put in a good deal of practice when nobody else was around, for it
needed very careful timing.

At last I was ready.  We were seated round the little table bolted to
one end of the -Morning Star's cabin-the end which was usually regarded
as the floor.  Ron was opposite me, and we'd been arguing in a
good-natured manner for some time.  It was obvious that a fight was
about to start at any minute.  When Ron began to unbuckle his seat
straps I knew it was time to take off.

He'd just unfastened himself when I shouted, "Come and get me!"  and
launched myself straight at the "ceiling," fifteen feet away.  This was
the bit that had to be.  timed carefully.  Once he'd judged the course
I was taking, Ron kicked himself off a fraction of a second after me.

In free orbit, once you'd launched yourself on a definite path, you
can't stop until you bump into something again.  Ron expected to meet
me on the ceiling; what he didn't expect was that I'd get only halfway
there.  For my foot was tucked in a loop of cord that Id thoughtfully
fastened to the floor.  I'd gone only a couple of yards when I jerked
to a stop, dragging myself back the way I'd come.  Ron couldn't do
anything but sail right on.

He was so surprised at seeing me jerk back that he rolled over while
ascending, to watch what had happened, and hit the ceiling with quite a
thud.  He hadn't recovered from this when I launched myself again, and
this time I didn't hang on to the cord.  Ron was still off balance as I
came up like a meteor.  He couldn't get out of the way in time and so I
knocked the wind out of him.  It was easy to hold him down for the
count of five; in fact, Norman got to ten before Ron showed any signs
of life.  I was beginning to get a bit worried when he finally started
to stir.

Perhaps it wasn't a very famous victory, and a number of people thought
I'd cheated.  Still, there was nothing against this sort of thing in
the rules.

It wasn7t a trick I could use twice, and Ron got his own back next
time.

But after all, he was older than I.

Some of our games weren't quite so rough.  We played a lot of chess,
with magnetic men, but as I'm no good at this, it wasn't much fun for
me.  About the only game at which I could always win was
"swimming"--not swimming in water, of course, but swimming in air.

This was so exhausting that we didn't do it very often.  You need a
fairly large room, and the competitors had to start floating in a line,
well away from the nearest wall.  The idea was to reach the winning
post by clawing your way through the air.  It was much like swimming
through water, but a lot harder and slower.  For some reason I was
better at it than the others, which is rather odd, because I'm not much
good at ordinary swimming.

Still, I mustn't give the impression that all our time was spent in the
Morning Star.  There is plenty of work for everyone on a space station,
and perhaps because of this the staff made the most of their time off.
And-this is a curious point that isn't very well known-we had more
opportunities for amusement than you might think because we needed very
little sleep.  That's one of the effects of zero gravity.  All the time
I was in space, I don't think I ever had more than four hours of
continuous sleep.

I was careful never to miss one of Commander Doyle's lectures, even
when there were other things I wanted to do.  Tim had advised me,
tactfully, that it would make a good impression if I was always
there-and the commander was a good speaker, anyway.  Certainly I'm
never likely to forget the talk on meteors which he gave to us.

Looking back on it, that's rather funny, because I thought the lecture
was going to be pretty dull.  The opening was interesting enough, but
it soon bogged down in statistics and tables.  You know what meteors
are-tiny particles of matter which whirl through space and burn up
through friction when they hit the earth's atmosphere.  The huge
majority are much smaller than sand grains, but sometimes quite large
ones, weighing many pounds, come tumbling down into the atmosphere. And
on very rare occasions, hundred or even thousand-ton giants come
crashing to earth and do considerable local damage.

In the early days of spaceflight many people were nervous about
meteors.

They didn't realize just how big space was and thought that leaving the
protective blanket of the atmosphere would be like entering a
machine-gun barrage.  Today we know better; though meteors are not a
serious danger, small ones occasionally puncture stations or ships, and
it's necessary to do something about them.

My attention had strayed while Commander Doyle talked about meteor
stream and covered the blackboard with calculations showing how little
solid matter there really was in the space between the planets.  I
became more interested when he began to say what would happen if a
meteor ever did hit us.

"You have to remember," he said, "that because of its speed a meteor
doesn't behave like a slow-moving object such as a rifle bullet, which
moves at a mere mile a second.  If a small meteor hits a solid
object--even a piece of paper-it turns into a cloud of incandescent
vapor.  That's one reason why this station has a double hull: the outer
shell provides almost complete protection against any meteors we're
ever likeli to meet.

"But there's still a faint possibility -that a big one might go through
both walls and make a fairly large hole.  Even that needn't be serious.
The air would start rushing out, of course, but every room that has a
wall toward space is fitted with one of these."

I He held up a circular disk, looking very much like a saucepan cover
with a rubber flange around it.  I'd often seen these disks, painted a
bright yellow, clipped to the walls of the station, but hadn't.given
them much thought.

"This is capable of taking care of leaks up to six inches in diameter.
All you have to do is to place it against the wall near the hole and
slide it along until it covers the leak.  Never try to clamp the disk
straight over the hole.  Once it's in place, the air pressure will keep
it there until a permanent repair can be made."

He tossed the disk down into the class.

"Have a look at it and pass it around.  Any questionsr'

I wanted to ask what would happen if the hole was more than six inches
across, but was afraid this might be regarded as a facetious
question.

Glancing around the class to see if anyone else looked like breaking
the silence, I noticed that Tim Benton wasn't there.  It was unusual
for him to be absent, and I wondered what had happened to him.  Perhaps
he was helping someone on an urgent job elsewhere in the station.

I had no further chance to puzzle over Tim's whereabouts.  For at that
precise moment there was a sudden, sharp explosion, quite deafening in
that confined space.  It was followed instantly by the terrifying,
high-pitched scream of escaping air, air rushing through a hole that
had suddenly appeared in the wall of the classroom.

 4 A PLAGUE OF PIRATES

------------FOR A MOMENT, as the out rushing air tore at our clothes
and tugged us toward the wall, we were far too surprised to do anything
except stare at the ragged puncture scarring the white paint.
Everything had happened too quickly for me to be frightened-that came
later.  Our paralysis lasted for a couple of seconds; then we all moved
at once.  The sealing plate had been lying on Norman Powell's desk, and
everyone made toward it There was a moment of confused pushing, then
Norman shouted above the shriek of air,

"Out of my way!"  He launched himself across the room, and the air
current caught him like a straw, in a millrace, slamming him into the
wall.  I watched in helpless fascination as he fought to prevent
himself being sucked against the hole.  Then, as suddenly as it had
begun, the whistling roar ceased.  Norman had managed to slide the seal
into place..

For the first time, I turned to see what Commander

Doyle had been doing during the crisis.  To my astonishment, he was
still sitting quietly at his desk.  What was more, there was a smile on
his face, and a stop-watch in his hand.  A dreadful suspicion began to
creep into my mind, a suspicion that became a certainty in the next few
moments.  The others were also staring at him, and there was a long,
icy silence.  Then

Norman coughed, and very ostentatiously rubbed his elbow where he had
bruised it against the wall.  If he could have managed a limp under
zero gravity, I'm sure he'd have done so as he went back to his desk.
When he reached there, he relieved his feelings by grabbing the elastic
band that held his writing pad in place, puffing it away and letting it
go with a

"Twackl" The commander continued to grin.

"Sorry if you've hurt yourself, Norman," he remarked.  "I really must
congratulate you on the speed with which you acted.  It took you only
five seconds to get to the wall, which was very good when one allows
for the fact that everybody else was getting in the way."

"Thank you, sir," replied Norman, with quite unnecessary emphasis on
the "sir."  I could see he still didn't like the idea of having a
practical joke played on him for a change.  "But wasn't it rather a
dangerous-er-trick to play?"

"Not at all.  If you want the technical details, theresa three-inch
pipe around that hole, with a stopcock at the end of it.  Tim is
sitting out there in a space suit, and if we hadn't sealed the leak
inside ten seconds, he'd have closed the tap and cut off the flow."

"How was the hole made?"  someone asked.

"Just a small explosive charge, a very small one," replied the
commander.

His grin had vanished and he had become quite serious again.

"I didn't do this just for fun.  One day you may ran into a Yeal leak,
and this test -may make all the difference because you'll know what to
do.  As you've seen, a puncture this size can make quite a draft and
could empty a room in half a minute.  But it's easy enough to deal with
if you act quickly and don't panic."

He turned to Karl Hasse, who, like the good student he was, always sat
in the front row.  - "Karl, I -noticed you were the only one who never
moved.  Why?"

In his dry, precise voice, Karl answered without any hesitation.

"It was simple deduction.  The chance of being hit by a large meteor
is, as you had explained, inconceivably rare.  The chance of being hit
by one just when you'd finished talking about them' was-well, so rare
that it's nearly impossible.  So I knew there was no dahger, and that
you must be conducting some sort of test.  That was why I just sat and
waited to see what would happen."

We all looked at Karl, feeling a little sheepish.  I suppose he was
right; he always was.  It didn't help to make him any more popular.

One of the biggest excitements of life in a space station is the
arrival of the mail rocket from earth.  The great interplanetary liners
can come and go, but they're not so important as the tiny, bright
yellow ships that keep the crews of the station in touch with home.
Radio messages are all very well, but they can't compare with letters
and, above all, parcels from earth.

The station mail department was a cubby-hole near one of the air locks,
and a small crowd usually gathered there even before the rocket had
coupled up.

As soon as the mailbags came aboard, they would be ripped open and some
high-speed sorting would take place.  Then the crowd would disperse,
everyone hugging his correspondence or else saying, "Oh, well, I wasn't
expecting anything this time..  ."  The lucky man who got a parcel
couldn't keep it to himself for long.  Space mail is expensive, and a
parcel usually meant one of those little luxuries you couldn't normally
-obtain on the station.

I was very surprised to find that I had quite a pile of letters waiting
for me after the first rocket arrived-most of them from perfect
strangers.  The great majority were from boys of my own age who'd heard
about me, .  or maybe had seen my TV appearances, and wanted to know
all about life on the station.  If I'd answered every one, there'd have
been no time for anything else.  What was worse, I couldn't possibly
aflord to acknowledge them, even if I had the time.  The postage would
have taken all my spare cash.

I asked Tim what I'd better do about it He looked at some of the
letters and replied:

"Maybe I'm being cynical, but I think most of them are after space-mail
stamps.  If you feel you ought to acknowledge them, wait until you get
back to earth.  ItIl be much cheaper."

That was what I did, though I'm afraid a lot of people were
disappointed.

There was also a parcel from home, containing a good assortment of
candy and a letter from Mom telling me to be sure to wrap up tight
against the cold.  I didnt'say anything about the letter, but the rest
of the parcel made me very popular for a couple of days.  ~ There
cannot be many people on earth who have never seen the TV serial

"Dan Drummond, Space Detective."  Most of them, at some time or,
another, must have watched Dan tracking down interplanetary smugglers
and assorted crooks, or have followed his never-ending' battle with
Black Jarvis, most diabolical of space pirates.

When I came to the station, one of my minor surprises was discovering
how popular Dan Drummond was among the staff.  If they were off duty,
and often when they weren't, they never missed an instalment of his
adventures.  Of course, they all pretended that they tuned in for the
laughs, but that wasn't quite true.  For one thing, "Dan Drummond"
isn't half so ridiculous as many of the other TV serials.  In fact, on
the technical side ifs pretty well done and the producers obviously get
expert advice, even if they don't always use it.  There's more than a
suspicion that someone aboard the station helps with the script, but
nobody has ever been able to prove this.

Even Commander Doyle has come under suspicion, though it's most
unlikely that anyone will ever accuse him outright.

We were all particularly interested In the current episode, as it
concerned a space station supposed to be orbiting Venus.  Blackies
marauding cruiser,

The Queen of Night, was running short of fuel, so the pirates were
planning to raid the station and replenish their tanks.  If they could
make off with some loot and hostages at the same time, so much the
better.  When the last instalment of the serial had ended, the pirate
cruiser, painted jet black, was creeping upon the unsuspecting station,
and we were all wondering what was going to happen nexL

There has never been such a thing as piracy in space, and since no one
except a multi-million combine can afford to build ships and supply
them with fuel, it's difficult to see how Black Jarvis could hope to
make a living.  This didn't spoil our enjoyment of the serial, but it
sometimes caused fierce arguments about the prospects for spatial
crime.  Peter van

Holberg, who spent a lot of his time reading lurid magazines and
watching the serials, was sure that something could be done if one was
really determined.  He amused himself by inventing all sorts of.
ingenious crimes and asking us what was to stop a person from getting
away with thenL We felt that he had missed his true vocation.

Black Jarvis' latest exploit made Peter unusually thoughtful, and for a
day or so he went around working out just how valuable the contents of
the station would be to an.  interplanetary desperado.  It made an
impressive figure, especially when one included the freight charges. If
Peter's mind hadn't already been working along these lines, he would
never have noticed the peculiar behavior of the Cygnus.

In addition to the spaceships on the regular, scheduled runs, ships on
special missions touched at the station about two or three times a
month.

Usually they were engaged on scientific research projects, occasionally
something really exciting like an expedition to the outer planets.
Whatever it was they were doing, everyone aboard the station always
knew all about it.

But no one knew much about the Cygnus, except that she was down in
Lloyd's

Register as a medium freighter and was about due to be withdrawn from
service, since she had been in operation for almost five years without
a major overhaul.  It attracted little surprise when she came up to the
station and anchored (yes, that's the expression still used) about ten
miles away.  This distance was greater than usual, but that might only
mean that she had an ultra cautious pilot.  And there she stayed.  All
attempts to discover what she was doing failed completely.  She had a
crew of two.  We knew that because they jetted over in their suits and
reported to Control.

They gave no clearance date and refused to state their business, which
was unheard of but not illegal.

Naturally this started many theories circulating.  One was that the
ship had been chartered secretly by Prince Edward, who as everybody
knew had been trying to get out into space for years.  It seems the
British Parliament won't let him go the heir to the throne being
considered too valuable to risk on such dangerous amusements as
spaceflight.  However, the Prince is such a determined young nyan that
no one will be surprised if he turns up on Mars one day, having
disguised himself and signed on with the crew.  If he ever attempts
such a journey, he'll find plenty of people ready to help him.

But Peter had a much more sinister theory.  The arrival of a mysterious
and un talkative spaceship fitted in perfectly with his ideas on
interplanetary crime.  If you wanted to rob a space station, he argued,
how else would you-set about it?

We laughed at him, pointing out that the Cygnus had done her best to
arouse suspicion rather.  than allay it Besides, she was a small ship
and couldn't carry a very large crew.  The two men who'd come across to
the station were probably all she had aboard.

By this time, however, Peter was so wrapped up in his theories that he
wouldn't listen to reason, and because it amused us we let him carry on
and even encouraged him.  But we didn't take him seriously.

The two men from the CYgnus would come aboard the station at least once
a day to collect any mail from earth and to read the papers and
magazines in the rest room.  That was natural enough, if they had
nothing else to do, but

Peter thought it highly suspicious.  It proved, according to him,
that-they were reconnoitering the station and getting to know their way
around.  "To lead the Way, I suppose," said someone sarcastically, "for
a boarding party with cutlasses."

Then, unexpectedly, Peter turned up fresh evidence that made us take
him a little more seriously.  He discovered from the Signals Section
that our mysterious guests were continually receiving messages from
earth, using their own radio on a wave band not allocated for official
or commercial services.  There was nothing illegal about that, since
they were operating in one of the "free ether" bands, but once again it
was unusual.  And they were using code.  That was most unusual.

Peter was very excited about 0 this.  "It proves that there's something
funny going on," he said belligerently.  "No one engaged on honest
business would behave like this.  I won't say that they're going in for
something as old-fashioned as piracy.  But what about drug
smuggling?"

"I should hardly think that the number of drug addicts in the Martian
and

Venusian colonies would make this very profitable," put in Tim Benton
mildly.

"I wasn't thinking of smuggling in that direction," retorted Peter
scornfully.  "Suppose someones discovered a drug on one of the planets
and is smuggling it back to earth?"

"You got that idea from the last Dan Drummond adventure but two," said
somebody.  "You know, the one they had on last year-all about the Venus
lowlands."

"There's only one way of finding out," continued Peter stubbornly. "I'm
going over to have a look.  Who'll come with me?"

There were no volunteers.  I'd have offered to go, but I knew he
wouldn't accept me.

"What, all afraid?"  Peter taunted.

"Just not interested," replied Norman.  "I've got better ways of
wasting my time."

Then, to our surprise, Karl Hasse came forward.  ""I'll.  go," he said.
"I'm getting fed up with the whole affair, and ifs the only way we can
stop Peter from harping on it."

It was against safety regulations for Peter to make a trip of this
distance by himself, so unless Karl had volunteered he would have had
to drop the idea.

"When are you going?"  asked Tim.

"They come over for their mail every afternoon, and when they're both
aboard the station we'll wait for the next eclipse period -and slip
out."

That would be the fifty minutes when the station was passing through
the earth's shadow.  It was very difficult to see small objects at any
distance then, so there was little chance of detection.  They would
also have some difficulty in finding the Cygnus, since she would
reflect very little starlight and would probably be invisible from more
than a half mile away.

Tim Benton pointed this out.

"I'll borrow a 'beeper' from Stores," replied Peter.  "Joe Evans will
let me sign for one."

A beeper is a tiny radar set, not much bigger than a hand torch, which
is used to locate objects that have drifted away from the station. It's
got a range of a few miles on anything as large as a space suit and
could pick up a ship a lot farther away.  You wave it around in space,
and when its beam hits anything you hear a series of "beeps." The
closer you get to the reflecting object, the faster the beeps come, and
with a little practice you can judge distances pretty accurately.

Tim Benton finally gave his grudging consent for this adventure, on
condition that Peter keep in radio touch all the time and tell him
exactly what was happening.  So I heard the whole thing over the
loud-speaker in one of the workshops.  It was easy to imagine that I
was out there with Peter and Karl in that star-studded darkness with
the great shadowy earth below me, and the station slowly receding
behind.

They had taken a careful sight of the Cygnus while she was still
visible by reflected sunlight and had waited for five minutes after
we'd gone into eclipse before launching themselves in- the right
direction.  Their course was so accurate that they had no need to use
the beeper: the Cygnus came looming up at them at just about the
calculated moment, and they slowed to a halt.

"All clear," reported Peter, and I could sense the excitement in his
voice.

"There's no sign of life."

"Can you see through the ports?"  asked Tim.  There was silence for a
while, apart from heavy breathing and an occasional metallic click from
the space suits controls.  Then we heard a "bump" and an exclamation
from Peter.

"That was pretty careless," came Karl's voice.  "If there was anyone
else inside, they ll think they've run into an aster did ~ "I couldn't
help it," protested Peter.  "My foot slipped on the jet control."  Then
we heard some scrabbling noises as he made his way over the hull.

"I can't see into the cabin," he reported.  "It's too dark.  But
there's certainly no one around.  I'll go aboard.  Is everything

O.K.T'

"Yes.  Our two suspects are playing chess in the recreation room.
Norman's looked at the board and says they'll be a long time yet."  run
chuckled.  I could see he was enjoying himself and taking the whole
affair as a great joke.  I was beginning to find it quite exciting.

"Beware of booby traps," Tim continued.  "I'm sure no experienced
pirates would walk out of their ship and leave it unguarded.  Maybe
there's a robot waiting in the air lock with a ray gum"

Even Peter thought this unlikely and said so in no uncertain tones.  We
heard more subdued bumpings as he moved around the hull to the air
lock, and then there was a long pause while he examined the controls.
They're standard on' every ship, and there's no way of locking them
from outside, so he did not expect much difficulty here.

"It's opening," he announced tersely.  "I'm going aboard."

There was another anxious interval.  When Peter spoke again, his voice
was much fainter, owing to the shielding effect of the ship's hia but
we could still hear him when we turned the volume up.

"The control room looks perfectly normal," he reported, with more than
a trace of disappointment in his voice.  "We're going to have a look at
the cargo."

"It's a little late to mention this," said Tim, "but do you realize
that you're committing piracy or something very much like it?  I
suppose the lawyers would call it 'unauthorized entry of a spaceship
without the knowledge and consent of the owners."  Anyone know what the
penalty is?"

Nobody did, though there were several alarming suggestions.  Then Peter
called to us again.

"This is a nuisance.  The hatch to the stores is locked.  I'm afraid
we'll have to give up; they ll have taken the keys with them."

"Not necessarily," we heard Karl reply.  "You know how often people
leave a spare set in case they lose the one they're carrying.  They
always hide it in what they imagine is a safe place, but you can
usually deduce where it is.9p

"Then go ahead, SherlocL Is it stiff all clear at your end?"

"Yes.  The game's nowhere near finished.  They seem to have settled
down for the afternoon."

To everyone's surprise, Karl found the keys in less than ten minutes.
They had been tucked into a little recess under the instrument paneL

"Here we gol" shouted Peter gleefully.

"For goodness' sake, don't interfere with anything," cautioned Tlim~
now wishing he'd never allowed the exploit.  "Just have a look around
and come straight home."

There was no reply; Peter was too busy with the door.  We heard the
muffled "clank" as he finally got it open and there were scrapings as
he slid through the entrance.  He was sun wearing his space suit, so
that he could keep in touch with us over the radio.  A moment later we
heard him shriek:

"Karl!  Look at this!"

"What's the fuss?"  Karl replied, still as calm as I ever.  "You nearly
blew in my eardrums.  il

We didn't help matters by shouting our own queries, and it was some
time before Tim restored order.

"Stop yelling, everybodyl Now, Peter, tell us exactly what you've
found."

I could hear Peter give a sort of gulp as he collected his breath.

"This ship is full of guns!"  he gasped.  "Honest-I'm not fooling!  I
can see about twenty of them, clippe'd to the walls.  And they're not
like any guns

I've ever seen before.  They've got funny nozzles, and there are red
and green cylinders fixed beneath them.  I can't imagine what they're
supposed--"

"Karl," Tim demanded, "is Peter pulling our legs?"

"No," came the reply.  "It's perfectly true.  I don't like to say this,
but if there are such things as ray guns, we're looking at them now."

"What shall we do?"  wailed Peter.  He didn't seem happy at finding
this support for his theories.

"Don't touch anything!"  ordered Tim.  "Give us a detailed description
of everything you can see and then come straight back."  -But before
Peter could obey, we all had a second and much worse shock.  For
suddenly we heard Karl gasp, What's that?"

There was silence for a moment; then a voice I could hardly recognize
as

Peter's whispered, "There's a ship outside.  It's connecting up.  What
shall we do?"

"Make a run for it," whispered Tim urgently-as if whispering made any
difference.  "Shoot out of the lock as quickly as you can and come back
to the station by different routes.  It's dark for another ten minutes;
they -probably won't see you."

"Too late," said Karl, still hanging on to the last shreds of his
composure.  "They're already coming aboard.  There goes the outer door
now."

 5, STAR TURN

--------------------------------------FOR A MOMENT NO ONE could think
of anything to say.  Then Tim, still whispering, breathed into the
microphone, "Keep calml If you tell them that you're in radio contact
with us, they won't dare touch you."  This, I couldn't help thinking,
was being rather optimistic.  Still, it might be good for our
companions' morale, which was probably at a pretty low ebb.

"I'm going to grab one of those guns," Peter called.  "I don't know how
they work, but it may scare them.  Karl, you take one as well."

"For heaven's sake, be careful warned Tirn, now looking very worried.
He turqed to Ronnie.

"Ron, call the commander and tell him what's happening--quicklyl And
get a telescope on the Cygnus to sec what shiVs over there."

We should have thought of this before, of course, but it had been
forgotten in the general excitement.

"They're in the control room now," reported Peter "I can see them.
They're not wearing space suits, and they aren't carrying guns.  That
gives us quite an advantage."

I suspected that Peter was beginning to feel a little happier,
wondering if he might yet be a hero.

"I'm going out to meet them," he announced suddenly.  "It's better than
waiting in here, where they're bound to find us.  Come on, Karl!"

We waited breathlessly.  I don't know what we expected-anything, I
imagine, from a salvo of shots to the hissing or crackling of whatever
mysterious weapons our friends were carrying.  The one thing we didn!t
anticipate was what actually happened.

We heard Peter say (and I give him full credit for sounding quite
calm):

"What are you doing here, and who are you?"

There was silence for what seemed an age.  I could picture the scene as
clearly as if I'd been present Peter and Karl standing at bay behind
their weapons, the men they had challenged wondering whether to
Surrender or to make a fight for it.

Then, unbelievably, someone laughed.  There were a few words we
couldn't catch in what seemed to be English, but they were swept away
by a roar of merriment.  It sounded as if three or four people were all
laughing simultaneously at the tops of their voices.

We could do nothing but wait and wonder until the tumult had finished.
Then a new voice, amused and friendly, came from the speaker.

"O.K."  boys, you might as well put those gadgets down.  You couldn't
kill a mouse with them unless you swatted it over the head.  I guess
you're from the station.  If you want to know who we are, this is
Twenty-first Century

Films, at your service.  I'm Lee Thomson, assistant producer.  And
those ferocious weapons you've got are the ones that Props made for our
new interstellar epic.  I'M glad to know they've convinced somebody.
They always looked quite phony to me."

No doubt the reaction had something to do with it, for we all dissolved
in laughter then.  When the commander'~ arrived, it was quite a while
before anyone could tell him' just what had happened.

The funny thing was that, though Peter and Karl had made such fools of
themselves, they really had the last laugh.  he film people made quite
a fuss over them and took them over to their ship, where they had a
good deal to eat that wasn't on the station's normal menu.

When we got to the bottom of it, the whole mystery had an absurdly
simple explanation.  Twenty-first Century were going all out to make a
real epic, the first interstellar and not merely interplanetary film.
And it was going to be the first feature film to be shot entirely in
space, without any studio faking.

All this explained the secrecy.  As soon as the other companies knew
what was going on, they'd all be climbing aboard the bandwagon.
Twenty-first

Century wanted to get as big a start as possible.  They'd shipped up
one load of props to await the arrival of the main unit with its
cameras and equipment.  Besides the "ray guns" that Peter and Karl had
encountered, the crates in the hold contained some weird four-legged
space suits for the beings that were supposed to live on the planets of
Alpha Centauri.  Twenty-first

Century was doing the thing in style, and we gathered that there was
another unit at work on the moon.

The actual shooting was not going to start for another two days, when
the actors would be coming up in a third ship.  There was much
excitement at the news that the star was none other than Linda Lorelli,
though we wondered how much of her glamour would be able to get through
a space suit.  Playing opposite her in one of his usual tough, he-man
roles would be Tex Duncan.

This was great news to Norman Powell, who had a vast admiration for Tex
and had a photograph of him stuck on his locker.

All these preparations next door to us were rather distracting, and
whenever we were off duty the station staff would jump into suits and
go across to see how the film technicians were getting on.  They had to
unload their cameras, which were fixed to little rocket units so that
they could move around slowly.  The second spaceship, was now being
elaborately disguised by the addition of blisters, turrets and fake
gun-housings to make it look (so Twenty-first Century hoped) like a
battleship from another solar system.  It was really quite impressive.
We were at one of Commander Doyle's lectures when the stars came
aboard.

The first we knew of their arrival was when the door opened and a small
procession drifted in.  The Station Commander came first, then his
deputy, and then Linda Lorelli.  She was wearing a rather worried
smile, and it was quite obvious that she found Ac absence of gravity
very confusing.

Remembering my own early struggles, I sympathized with her.  She was
escorted by an elderly woman who seemed at home under zero g and gave
Linda a helpful push when she showed signs of being stuck.

Tex Duncan followed close behind.  He was trying to manage without an
escort and not succeeding very welL He was a good deal older than I'd
guessed from his films, probably at least thirty-five.  And.you could
see through his hair in any direction you cared to look.  I glanced at
Norman, wondering how he'd reacted to the appearance of his hero.  He
looked just a shade disappointed.

It seemed that everyone had heard about Peter and Karrs adventure,
for

Nfiss Lorelli was introduced to them, and they all shook hands very
politely.  She asked several sensible questions about their work,
shuddered at the equations Commander Doyle had written on the
blackboard and invited us all across to the company's largest ship, the
Orson Telles, for tea.  I thought she was very nice, much more
agreeable than Tex, who looked bored stiff with the whole business.

After this, I'm afraid, the Morning Star was deserted, particularly
when we found that we' could make some money giving a hand on the sets.
The fact that we, were all used to weightlessness made us very use rid
for though most of the film technicians had been into space before,
they were not very happy under zero g and so moved slowly and
cautiously.  We could manage things much more efficiently, once we had
been told what to-do.

A good deal of the film was being shot on sets inside the Orson Welles,
which had been fitted up as a sort of flying studio.  All the scenes
which were supposed to take place inside a spaceship were being shot
here against suitable backgrounds of machinery, control boards, and so
on.  The really interesting sequences, however, were those which had to
be filmed out in space.

There was one episode, we gathered, in which Tex Duncan would have to
save

Miss Lorelli from falling helplessly through space into the path of an
approaching planet.  As it was one of Twenty-first Century's proudest
boasts that Tex never used stand-ins, but actually carried out even the
most dangerous feats himself, we were all looking forward to this.  We
thought it might be worth seeing, and as it turned out we were right.

I had now been on the station for a fortnight and considered myself an
old hand.  It seemed perfectly natural to have no weight, and I had
almost forgotten the meaning of the words "up" and "down."  Such
matters as sucking liquids through tubes instead of drinking them from
cups or glasses were no longer novelties but part of everyday life.

I think there was only one thing I really missed on the station.  It
was impossible to have a bath the way you could on earth.  I'm very
fond of lying in a hot tub until -someone comes banging on the door to
make certain

I haven't fallen asleep..  On the station you could have only a shower,
and even this meant standing inside a fabric cylinder and lacing it
tight round your neck to prevent the spray from escaping.  Any large
volume of water formed a big globe that would float around until it hit
a wall.  When that happened, some of it would break up into smaller
drops which would go wandering off on their own, but most of- it would
spread all over the surface it had touched, making a horrid mess.

Over in the Residential Station, where there was gravity, they had
baths and even a smalli ' swimming POOL Everyone thought that this last
idea was simply showing Off.

The rest of the staff, as well as the apprentices, had come to take me
for granted and sometimes I was able to help in odd jobs.  I'd learned
as much as I could, without bothering people by asking too many
questions, and had filled four thick notebooks with information and
sketches.  When I -got back to earth, I'd be able to write a book about
the station if I wanted to.

As long as I kept in touch with Tim Benton or the commander, I was now
allowed to go more or less where I liked.  The place that fascinated me
most was the observatory, where they had a small but powerful telescope
that I could play with when no one else was using it.

I never grew tired of looking at the earth as it axed and waned
below.

Usually the countries beneath us were clear of cloud, and I could get
distinct views of the lands over which we were hurtling.  Because of
our speed, the ground beneath was rolling back five miles every second.
But as we were five hundred miles up, if the telescope was kept
trEicking correctly you could keep an object in the field of view for
quite a long time, before it got lost in the mists near the horizon.
There was a neat automatic gadget on the telescope mounting that took
care of this.  Once you'd set the instrument on anything, it kept
swinging at just the right speed.

As we swept around the world, I could survey in each hundred minutes a
belt stretching as far north as Japan, the Gulf of Mexico and the Red
Sea.  To the south I could see as far as Rio de Janeiro, Madagascar and
Australia.

It was a wonderful way of learning geography, though because of the
earth's curvature the more distant countries were very much distorted,
and it was hard to recognizetthem from ordinary maps.

Lying as it did above the Equator, the orbit of the station passed
directly above two of the world's greatest rivers, the Congo and the
Amazon.  With my telescope I could see right into the jungles and had
no difficulty at aindiv id al 5ees and the larger animals.  n se~atjon
w s

T In PicrUcta Rela a wonderful place %h gre to watch, because if I
hunted around I could find almost any animal

I cared to name.

I also spent a lot of time looking outward, away from earth.  Although
I was virtually no nearer the moon and planets than I was on earth-for
at this altitude I was still only a five-hundredth of the way to the
moon-now that

I was.  outside the atmosphere I could get infinitely clearer views.
The great lunar mountains seemed so close that I wanted to reach out
and run my fingers along their ragged crests.  Where it was night on
the moon I could see some of the lunar colonies shining away like stars
in the darkness.  But ~ the most wonderful sight of all was the
take-off of a spaceship.  When I had a chance, I'd listen to the radio
and make a note of departure times.

Then Id go to the telescope, aim it at the right part of the moon, and
wait.

All Id see at first would be a circle of darkness.  Suddenly the red be
a tiny spark that would grow brighter and brighter.  At the same time
it would begin to expand as the rocket rose higher and the glare of its
exhausts lit up more and more of the lunar landscape.  In that
brilliant, blue-white illumination I could see the mountains and plains
of the moon, shining as brightly as they ever did in daylight.  As the
rocket climbed, the circle of light would grow wider and fainter, until
presently it was too dim to reveal any more details of the land,
beneath  The ascending spaceship would become a brilliant, tiny star
moving swiftly across the moon's, dark face.

A few minutes later, the star would wink out of existence almost as
suddenly as it had been born.  The ship had escaped from the moon and
was safely launched on its jou;they.  In thirty or forty hours it would
be sweeping into the orbit of the station, and I would be watching its
crew come aboard, as un concerneffly as if they'd just taken a 'copter
ride to the next town.

I think I wrote more letters while I was -on the station than I did in
a year at home.  They were all very short, and they all ended: "P.S.
Please send this cover back to me for my collection."  That was one way
of making sure I'd have a set of space-mail stamps that would be the
envy of everyone in our district.  I stopped when I ran out of money,
and a lot of distant aunts and uncles were probably surprised to hear
from me.

I also did one TV interview, a two-way affair, with my questioner down
on earth.  It seems there'd been a good deal of interest roused by my
trip to the station, and everyone wanted to know how I was getting on.
I told them

I was having a fine time and didn't want to come back for a while, at
any rate.  There were still plenty of things to do and see, and the
Twenty-first

Century film unit was now getting into its stride.

While the technicians were making their preparations, Tex Duncan had
been learning how to use a space suit.  One of the engineers had the
job-of teaching him~ and we learned that he didn't think much of his
pupil.  Mr.

Duncan was too sure that he knew all the answers, "and because he could
fly a jet he thought handling a suit would be easy.

I got a ringside seat the day they started the free space shots.  The
unit was operating about fifty miles away from the station, and we'd
gone over in the Skylark, our private yacht, as we sometimes called
her.

Twenty-first Century had had to make this move -for a rather amusing
reason.  One would have thought that, since they had at great trouble
and expense got their actors and cameras out into space, they had only
to go ahead and start shooting.  But they soon found that it didn't
work out that way.  For one thing, the lighting was all wrong.

Above the atmosphere, when you're in direct sunshine, it's as if you
have a single, intense spotlight playing on you.  The sunward side of
any object is brilliantly illuminated, the dark side utterly black.  As
a result, when you look at an object In space you can see only.  part
of it Youmay have to wait until it's revolved and been fully
illuminated before you can got a picture of it as a whole.  ,

One gets used to this sort of thing in time, but Twentyfirst Century
decided that it would upset audiences down on earth.  So they decided
to get some additional lighting to fill in the shadows.  For a while
they even considered dragging out extra floodlights and floating them
in space around the actors, but the power needed to compete with the
sun was so tremendous that they gave up the idea.  Then someone said,
"Why not use mirrors?"  This idea would probably have fallen through as
well, if somebody else hadn't remembered that the biggest mirror ever
built was floating in space only a few miles away.

The old solar power station had been out of use for over thirty years,
but its giant reflector was still as good as new.  It had been built in
the early days of astronautics to tap the flood of energy pouring from
the sun, and to convert it into useful electric power.  The main
reflector was a great bowl almost three hundred feet across, shaped
just like a searchlight mirror.  Sunlight falling upon it was
concentrated onto, heating coils at the focus, where it flashed water
into steam and so drove turbines and generators.

The mirror itself was a very flimsy structure of curved girders,
supporting incredibly thin sheets of metallic sodium.  Sodium had been
used because it was light and formed a good reflector.  All these
thousands of facets collected the sunlight and beamed it at one spot,
where the heating coils had been when the station was operating.
However, the generating gear hat been removed long ago, and only the
great mirror was left, floating aimlessly in space.  No one minded
Twenty-first Century using it for their own purposes if they wanted to.
They asked permission, were charged a nominal rent, and told to go
ahead.

What happened then was one of those things that seems very obvious
afterward, but which nobody thin of beforehand.  When we arrived on-the
scene, the camera crews were in place about five hundred feet from the
great mirror, some distance off the line between it and the sun.
Anything on this line was now illuminated on both side-from one
direction by direct sunlight, from the other by light which had fallen
on the mirror, been brought to a focus, and spread out again.  I'm
sorry if this all sounds a bit complicated, but its important that you
understand the setup.

The Orson Welles was, floating behind the cameramen, who were playing
round with a dummy to get the right angles when we arrived.  When
everything was perfect, the dummy would be hauled in and Tex Duncan
would take its place.

Everyone would have to work quickly because they wanted the crescent
earth in the background.  Unfortunately, because of our swift orbital
movement, earth waxed and waned Ao quickly that only ten minutes in
every hour were suitable for filming

While these preparations were being made, we went in the power station
control room.  This was a large pressurized cylinder on the rim of the
great mirror, with windows giving a good view in all directions.  It
had been made habitable and the air~ conditioning brought into service
again by some of our own technicians-for a suitable fee, of course.
They had also had the job of swinging the mirror round until it faced
the sun once more.  This had been done by fixing some rocket units to
the rim and letting them fire for a few seconds at the calculated
times.  Quite a tricky business, and one that could be done only by
experts.

We were rather surprised to find Commander Doyle in the sparsely
furnished control room.  For his part, he seemed a little embarrassed
to meet us.  I wondered why he was interested in earning some extra
money since he never went down to earth to'gpend it

While we were waiting for something to happen, he explained how the
station had operated and why the development of cheap and simple atomic
generators.  had made the place obsolete.  From time to time I glanced
out of the window to see how the cameramen were getting on.  We had a
radio tuned in to their circuit, and the director's instructions came
over it in a never-ending stream.  I'm sure he wished he was back in a
studio down on earth, and was cursing whoever had thought of this crazy
idea of shooting a. film in space.

The great concave mirror was a really impressive sight from here on its
run.  A few of the facets were missing, and I could see the stars
shining through, but apart from this-it was quite intact-and, of
course, completely untarnished.  I felt like a fly crawling on the edge
of a metal saucer.

Although the entire bowl of the mirror was being flooded with sunlight,
it ' seemed dark from where we were stationed.  All the light it was
collecting was going to a point about two hundred feet out in space.
There were still some supporting girders reaching out to the focus
point where the heating coils had been, but now they simply ended in
nothingness.

The great moment arrived at last.  We saw the air lock of the Orson
Welles swing open and Tex Duncan emerged.  He had learned to handle his
space suit reasonably well, though I'm sure I could have done better if
I'd had as much chance to practice.

The dummy was pulled away, the director started giving his
instructions, and the cameras began to follow Tex.  There was little
for him to do in this scene except to make a few simple maneuvers with
his suit.  He was, I gathered, supposed to be adrift in space after the
destruction of his ship and was trying to 16cate any other survivors.
Needless to say, Miss Lorelli would be among them, but she hadn't yet
appeared on the scene.  Tex held the stage-if you could call it
that-~-all to himself.

The cameras continued shooting until the earth was half fall and some
of the continents had becouie recognizable.  There was no point in
continuing then, for this would give the game away.  The action was
supposed to be taking place off one of the planets of Alpha Centauri,
and it would never do if the audience recognized New Guinea, India or
the Gulf of Mexico.  That would destroy the illusion with a bang.

There was nothing to do but wait for thirty minutes until earth became
a crescent again, and its telltale geography was hidden by mist or
cloud.  We heard the director tell the camera crews to stop shooting,
and everyone relaxed.  Tex announced over the radio, "I'm lighting a
pigarette-I've always wanted to smoke in a space suit."  Somebody
behind me muttered, "Showing off again-serve him right if it makes him
spacesickl"

There were a few more instructions to the camera crews, and then we
heard

Tex again.

"Another twenty minutes, did you say?  Damed if Ill hang round all that
time.  I'm going over to look at this glorified shaving mirror."

"That means us," remarked Tim Benton in deep disgust.

"O.K.," replied the director, who probably knew better than to argue
with

Tex.  "But be sure you're back in time."

I was watching through the observation port and saw the faint mist
from

Tex's jets as he started toward us.

"He's going pretty fast," someone remarked.  "I hope he can stop in
time.  We don't want any more holes in our nice mirror."

Then everything seemed to.  happen at once.  I heard Commander Doyle
shouting, "Tell that fool to stopl Tell him to brake for all he's
worthl

He's heading for the focus -it'll burn him to a cinderl"

It was several seconds before I understood what he meant.  Then I
remembered that all the light and heat collected by our great mirror
was being poured into that tiny volume of space toward which Tex was
blissfully floating.

Someone had told me that it was equal to the heat of ten thousand
electric fires, and concentrated into a beam only a few feet wide.  Yet
there was absolutely nothing visible to the eye, no way in which one
could sense the danger until it was too I ate.  Beyond the focus, the
beam spread out again, soon to become harmless.  But where the heating
coils had been, in that gap between the girders, it could melt any
metal in seconds.  Tex had aimed himself straight at the gap!  If he
reached it, he would Iasi about as long as a moth in an oxyacetylene
fiamel

 HOSPITAL IN S PACE

-------------SOMEONE WAS SHOUnNG -OVER the radio, trying to send a
warning to Tex.  Even if it reached him in time, I wondered if he'd
have sense enough to act correctly.  It was just as likely that he'd
panic and start spinning out of control without altering his course.

The commander must have realized this, for suddenly he shouted:

"Hold tight, everybody!  I'm going to tip the mirrorl"

I grabbed the nearest handhold.  Commander Doyle, with a single jerk of
those massive forearms, launched himself across to the temporary
control panel that had been installed near the observation window.  He
glanced up at the approaching figure and did some rapid mental
calculations.  Then his fingers flashed out and played' across the
switches of the rocket firing panel.

Three hundred feet away, on the far side of the great mirror, I saw the
first jets of flame stabbing against the stars.  A shudder ran through
the framework an around Us, it Was never meant to be swung as quickly
as this.  Even so, it seemed to turn very slowly.  Then

I saw that the sun was moving off to one side.  We were no longer aimed
directly toward it, and the invisible cone of fire converging from Our
mirror was now opening out harmlessly into space.  How near it passed
to Tex we never knew, but he Sad later that there was one brief,
blinding explosion of light that swept past him, leaving him blinded
for minutes.

The controlling rockets burned themselves out, and with a gasp of
relief I let go of my handhold.  Although the acceleration had been
slight (there was not enough power in these small units to produce any
really violent effect), it was more than the mirror had ever been
designed to withstand, and some of the reflecting surfaces had torn
adrift and were slowly spinning in space.  So, for that matter, was the
whole power station.  It would take a long period of careful juggling
with the jets to iron out the spin that Commander Doyle had given it.
Sun, earth and stars were Slowly turning all about us and I had to
close my eyes before I could get any sense of orientation.

When I opened them again, the commander was busily talking to the
Orson

Welles, explaining just what had happened and saying exactly what he
thought of Mr.  Duncan.  That was the end of shooting for the day, and
it was quite a while before anyone saw Tex again.

Soon after this episode, our visitors packed their things and went
farther out into space, much to our disappointMent.  The fact that we
were in darkness for half the time, while passing through the shadow of
the earth, was too big a handicap for efficient filming.  Apparently
they had never thought of this, and when we heard of them again they
were ten thousand miles out, in a slightly tilted orbit that kept them
in perpetual sunlight.~ We were sorry to see them go, because they had
proo.  vided much entertainment and we'd been anxious to see the famous
ray guns in action.

To everyone's surprise, the entire unit eventually got back to earth
safely.  But we're still waiting for the film to appear.

It was the end, too, of Norman's hero worship.  The photo of Tex
vanished from his locker and was never seen again.

In my prowling around, I'd now visited almost every part of the station
that wasn't strictly out of bounds.  The forbidden * territory included
the power plant-which was radioactive anyway, so that nobody could go
into it-the Stores Section, guarded by a fierce quartermaster, and the
main control room.  this was one place I'd badly wanted to go; it was
the "brain" of the station, from which radio contact was maintained
with all the ships in this section of space, and of course with earth
itself.  Until everyone knew that I could be trusted not to make a
nuisance of myself, there was little chance of my being allowed in
there.  But I was determined to manage it someday, and at last I got
the opportunity.

One of the tasks of the junior apprentices was to take coffee and light
refreshments to the duty officer in the middle of his watch.  This
always occurred when the station was crossing the Greenwich Meridian.
Since it took exactly a hundred minutes for us to make one trip around
the earth, everything was based on this interval and our clocks were
adjusted to give a local "hour" of this length.  After a while one got
used to being able to judge the time simply by glancing at the earth
and seeing what continent was beneath.

The coffee, like all drinks, was carried in closed containers
(nicknamed "milk bottles") and had to be drunk by sucking through a
plastic tube, since it wouldn't pour in the absence of gravity.  The
refreshments were taken up to the control room in a light frame with
little holes for the various containers, and their arrival was always
much appreciated by the staff on duty, except when they were dealing
with some emergency and were too busy for anything else.

It took a lot of persuading before I got Tim Benton to put me down for
this job.  I pointed out that it relieved the other boys for more
important work; to which he retorted that it was one of the few jobs
they liked d But at last

Omghe gave in.

I'd been carefully briefed, and just as the station was passing ovex
the

Gulf of Guinea I stood 'outside the control room and tinkled my little
bell.  (There were a lot of quaint customs like this aboard the
station.)

The duty officer shouted, "Come in!"  I steered my tray through the
door and then handed out the food and drinks.  The last milk bottle
reached its customer just as we were passing over the African coast.

They must have known I was' coming because no one seemed in the least
surprised to see me.  As I had to stay and collect the empties, there
was plenty of opportunity to look around the control room.  It was
spotlessly clean and.  tidy, dome-shaped, and with a wide glass panel
running right round it.  Besides the duty officer and his assistant
there were several radio operators at their instruments, and other men
working on equipment I couldn't recognize.  Dials and TV screens were
everywhere, lights were flashing on and off, yet the whole place was
silent.  The men sitting at their little desks were wearing headphones
and throat microphones, so that any two people could talk without
disturbing the others.  It was fascinating to watch these experts
working swiftly at their tasks, directing ships thousands of miles
away, talking to the other space stations or to the moon and checking .
the many instruments on which our lives depended.

The duty officer sat at a huge glass-topped desk on which, glowed a
complicated pattern of colored lights.  It showed the earth, the orbits
of the other stations and the courses of all the ships in our part of
space.

From time to time he would say something quietly, his lips scarcely
MOVing, and I knew that some order was winging its way out to an
approaching ship, telling it to hold off a little longer or to prepare
for contact.

I dared not hang around once I'd finished my job, but the next day I
had a second chance.  Because things were rather slack, one of the
assistants was kind enough to show me around.  He let me listen to some
of the radio conversations, and explained the workings, of the great
display panel.  The thing that impressed me most of all, however, was
the shining metal cylinder, covered with controls and winking lights,
which occupied the center of the room.

"This," said my guide proudly, "is HAVOC."

"What?"  I asked.

Short for Automatic Voyage Orbit Computer.  I thought this over for a
moment.

"What does the H stand for?"

"Everyone asks that.  It doesn't stand for anything."  He turned to the
operator.

"What's she set up for now?"

The man gave an answer that consisted chiefly of mathematics, but I did
catch the word Venus.  ""Right  Let's suppose we wanted to leave for
Venus inoh, four hours from now."  His hands flicked across a keyboard
like that of an overgrown typewriter.

I expected HAVOC to whir and click, but all that happened was that a
few lights changed color.  Then, after about ten seconds, a buzzer
sounded twice and a piece of tape slid out of a narrow slot.  It was
covered with closely printed figures.

"There you are-everything you want to know.  Direotion of firing,
elements of orbit, time of flight, when to start braking.  All you need
now is a spaceshipl"

I wondered just how many hundreds of calculations the electronic brain
had carried out in those few seconds.  Space travel was certainly a
complicated affair, so complicated that it sometimes depressed me. Then
I remembered that these men didn't seem any cleverer than I was; they
were highly trained, that was all.  If one worked hard enough, one
could master anything.

My time on the Inner Station was now drawing to an end, though not in
the way anyone had expected.  I had slipped into the uneventful routine
of life, and it had been explained to me that nothing exciting ever
happened up here and if I'd wanted thrills I should have stayed back on
earth.  That was a little disappointing, for I'd hoped that something
out of the ordinary would take place while I

was here, though I couldn't imagine what As it turned out, my wish was
soon to be fulfilled.

But before I come to that, I see I'll have to say something about the
other space stations, which Ive neglected so far.

Ours, only five hundred nines up, was the nearest to the earth, but
there were others doing equally important jobs at much greater
distances.  The farther out they were, the longer, of course, they took
to make a complete revolution.  Our "day" was only a hundred minutes,
but the outermost stations of all took twenty-four hours to complete
their orbit, thus providing.  the curious results which I'll mention
later.

The purpose of the Inner Station, as Ive explained, was to act as a
refueling, repair and transfer point for spaceships, both outgoing and
incoming.  For this job, it was necessary to be as close to the earth
as -possible.  Much lower than five hundred miles would not have been
safe since the last faint traces of air would have robbed the station
of its speed and eventually brought it crashing down.

The Meteorological Stations, on the other hand, had to be a fair
distance out so that they could "see" as much of the earth as possible.
There were two of them, six thousand miles up, circling the world every
six and a half hours.  Like our Inner Station, they moved over the
Equator.  This meant that, though they could see much farther north and
south than we could, the polar regions were still out of sight or badly
distorted.  Hence the existence of the Polar Met Station, which, unlike
all the others, had an orbit passing over the poles.  Together, the
three stations could get a practically continuous picture of the
weather over the whole planet.

A good deal of astronomical work was also carried on in these
stations.

Some very large telescopes had been constructed here, floating in free
orbit where their weight wouldn't matter.  Beyond the Met Stations,
fifteen thousand miles up, circled the biology labs and the famous
Space Hospital.  There a great deal of research into zero-gravity
conditions was carried out, and many diseases which were incurable on
earth could be treated.  For example, the heart no longer had to work
so hard to pump blood round the-body, and so could be rested in a
manner impossible on earth.

Finally, twenty-two thousand miles out were the three great Relay
Stations.

They took exactly a day to make one revolution; therefore they appeared
to be fixed forever over the same spots on the earth.  Linked to each
other by tight radio beams, they provided TV coverage over the whole
planet.  And not only TV, but all the long-distance radio and 'phone
services passed through the Relay Chain, the building of which at the
close of the twentieth century had completely revolutionized' world
communications.

One station, serving the Americas, was in Latitude 90* West.  A second,
in 30" East, covered Europe and Africa.  The third, in 1501 East,
served the entire Pacific area.  There was no spot on earth where you
could not pick up one or other' of the stations.  And once you had
trained your receiving equipment in the right direction, there was
never any need to move it again.  The sun, moon and planets might rise
and set, but the three Relay

Stations never moved from their fixed positions in the sky.

The different orbits were connected by a shuttle service of small
rockets which made trips.  at infrequent intervals.  On the whole,
there was little traffic between the various stations.  Most of their
business was done directly with earth.  At first I had hoped to visit
some of our neighbors, but a few inquiries had made it obvious that I
hadn't a chance.  I was due to return home inside a week, and there w
as no spare passenger space available during that time.  Even if there
had been, it was pointed out to me, there were many more useful loads
that could be carried.  I was in the Morning Star watching Ronnie
Jordan put the finishing touches to a beautiful model spaceship when
the radio called.  It was Tim Benton, on duty back at the station.  He
sounded very excited.

"Is that Ron?  Anyone else there-what, only Roy?  Well, never
mind-listen to this, it's very important."

"Go ahead," replied Ron.  We were both considerably surprised, for we'd
never heard Tim really excited before.

"We want to use the Morning Star.  I've promised the commander that
she'll be ready in three hours."

"What!"  gasped Ronnie.  "I don't believe it!"

"There's no time to argue-I'll explain later.  The others are coming,
over right away.  They'll have to use space suits, as you've got the
Skylark with you.  Now then, make aHst of these points and start
checking."  I

For the next twenty minutes we were busy testing the controls-that is,
those which would operate at all.  We couldn't imagine what had
happened, but were too My occupied to do much speculating. Fortunately,
I'd got to know my way around the Morning Star so thoroughly that I was
able to give

Ron quite a bit of help, calling meter readings to him, and so on.

Presently there was a bumping and banging from the air lock and three
of our colleagues came aboard, towing batteries and power tools.  They
had made the trip on one of the rocket tractors used for moving ships
and stores around- the station, and had brought two drums of fuel
across with them, enough to E41 the auxiliary tanks.  From them we
discovered what A the fuss was about.

It was a medical emergency.  One of the passengers from a Mars-Earth
liner, which had just docked at the Residential Station, had been taken
seriously ill and had to have an operation within ten hours.  The only
chance of saving his life was to get him out to the Space Hospital, but
unfortunately ships at the Inner Station were being serviced and would
take at least a day to get space worthy

It was Tim who'd talked the commander into giving us this chance. The

Morning Star, he pointed out, had been very carefully looked after, and
the requirements for a trip to the Space Hospital were not great.  Only
a small amount of fuel would be needed, and it wouldn't even be
necessary to use the main motors.  The whole journey could be made on
the auxiliary rockets.

Since he could think of no alternative, Commander Doyle had reluctantly
agreed, after stating a number of conditions.  We had to get the
Morning Star over to the station under her own power so that she could
be fueled up and he would do all the piloting.

During the next hour, I did my best to be 'useful and to become
accepted as one of the crew.  My chief job was going over the ship and
securing loose objects, which might start crashing round when power was
applied.  Perhaps "crashing" is too strong a word, as we weren't going
to use much of an acceleration.  But anything adrift might be a
nuisance and could even be dangerous if it got into the wrong place.

It was a great moment when Norman Powell started the motors.  He gave a
short burst of power at very low thrust, while everyone watched the
meters for signs of danger.  We were all wearing our space suits as a
safety precaution.  If one of the motors exploded, it would probably
not harm us up here in the control room, but it might easily spring a
leak in the hull.

Everything went according to plan.  The mild acceleration made us all
drift toward what had suddenly become the floor.  Then the feeling of
weight ceased again, and everything was normal once more.

There was much comparing of meter readings, and at last Norman said,
"the motors seem O.K. Let's get started."

And so the Morning Star began her first voyage for almost a hundred
years.

It was not much of a journey, compared with her great trip to Venus. In
fact, it was only about five miles, from the graveyard over to the
Inner

Station.  Yet to all of us it was a real adventure, for we were all
very fond of the wonderful old ship.

We reached the Inner Station after about five minutes, and Norman
brought the ship to rest several hundred yards away.  He was taking no
risks with his first command.  The tractors were already fussing
around, and before long the tow ropes had been attached and the Morning
Star was hauled in.

It was at that point that I decided I'd better keep out of the way.
Rear of the workshop (which had once been the Morning Star's hold) were
several smaller chambers,

usually occupied by stores.  Most of the loose equipment aboard the
ship had now been stuffed into these and lashed securely in place.
However, there was still plenty of room left.

I want to make one thing quite clear.  Although the word "stowaway" has
been used, I don't consider it at all accurate.  No one had actually
told me to leave the ship, and I wasn't hiding.  If anybody had come
through the workshop and rummaged around in the storeroom, he would
have seen me.  But nobody did, so whose fault was that?

Time seemed to go very slowly while I waited.  I could hear.  distant,
muffled shouts and orders, and after a while there came the
unmistakable pulsing of the pumps as fuel came surging into the tanks.
Then there was another long interval.  I knew Commander Doyle must be
waiting until the ship had reached the right point in her orbit around
the earth before he turned on the motors.  I had no idea when this
would be, and the suspense was terrible.

But at last the rockets roared into life.  Weight returned.  I slid
down the walls and found myself really standing on a solid floor again.
I took a few steps to see what it felt like and didn't enjoy the
experience.  In the last fortnight I had grown so accustomed to lack of
gravity that its temporary return was a nuisance.

The thunder of the motors lasted for three or four minutes, and by the
end of that time I was almost deafened by the noise, though I had
pushed my fingers into my ears.  Passengers weren't supposed to travel
so near the rockets, and I was very glad when at last there was a
sudden slackening in thrust and the roar surrounding me began to fade.
Soon it ebbed into silence, though my head was still ringing, and it
would be quite a while before I could hear properly again.  But I
didn't mind that.  All that really mattered was that the journey had
begun, and no one could send me back!

I decided to wait for a while before going up to the control room.

Commander Doyle would still be busy checking his course, and I didn't
want to bother him while he was occupied.  Besides, I had to think of a
good story.

Everyone was surprised to see me.  There was complete silence when I
drifted through the door and said: "Hellol I think someone might have
warned me that we were going to take off."

Commander Doyle Simply stared at me.  For a moment I couldn't decide
whether he was going to be angry or not.  Then he said: "What are you
doing aboard?"

"I was lashing down the gear in the storeroom."

He turned to Norman, who looked a little unhappy.

"Is that correct?"

"Yes, Sir.  I told him to do it, but I thought he'd finished."

The commander considered this for a moment.  Then he said to me: "Well,
we've no time to go into this now.  You're here, and we'll have to put
up with you."

This was not very flattering, but it might have been much worse.  And
the expression on Norman's face was worth going a long way to see.

The remainder of the Morning Star's crew consisted of Tim Benton, who
was looking at me with a quizzical smile, and Ronnie Jordan, who
avoided my gaze altogether.  We had two passengers.  The sick man was
strapped to a stretcher that had been fixed against one wall; he must
have been drugged, for he remained unconscious for the whole journey.
With him was a young doctor who did nothing except look anxiously at
his watch and give his patient an injection from time to time.  I don't
think he said more than a dozen words during the whole trip.

Tim explained to me later that the sick man was suffering -from an
acute, and fortunately very rare, type of stomach trouble caused by the
return of high gravity.  It was very lucky for him that he had managed
to reach the earth's orbit, because if he had been taken ill on the two
months' voyage, the medical resources of the liner could not have saved
him.

There was nothing for any of us to do while the Morning Star swept
outward on the long curve that would bring her, after some three and a
half hours, to the Space Hospital.  Very slowly, earth was receding
behind us.  It was no longer so close that it filled almost half the
sky.  Already we could see far more of its surface than was possible
from the Inner

Station, skimming low above the Equator.  Northward, the Mediterranean
crept into view; then, Japan and New Zealand appeared almost
simultaneously over opposite horizons.

And still the earth dwindled behind us.  Now it was a sphere at last,
hanging out there in space, small enough for the eye to take in the
whole of it at one glance.  I could now seo-so far to the south that
the great

Antarctic ice cap was just visible, a gleaming white fringe beyond the
tip of Patagonia.

We were fifteen thousand miles above the earth, swimming into the path
of the Spare Hospital.  In a moment we would have to use the rockets
again to match orbits.  This time, however, I should have a more
comfortable ride, here in the soundproof cabin.

Once again weight returned with the roaring rockets.  There was one
prolonged burst of power, then a series of short corrections.  When it
was all over, Commander Doyle unstrapped himself from the pilot's seat
and drifted over to the observation port.  His instruments told him
where he was far more accurately than his eyes could ever do, but he
wanted the satisfaction of seeing for himself.  I also made for a port
that no one else was using.

Floating there in space beside us was what seemed to be a great crystal
flower, its face.  turned full toward the sun.  At first there was no
way in which I could judge its true scale or guess how far away it was.
Then, through the transparent walls, I could see little figures moving
around and catch the gleam of sunlight on complex machines and
equipment.  The station must be at least five hundred feet in diameter,
and the cost of lifting all this material fifteen thousand miles from
the earth must be staggering.

Then I recalled that very little of it had come from earth, anyway.
Like the other stations, the Space Hospital had been constructed almost
entirely from components manufactured on the moon.  As we slowly
drifted closer, I could see people gathering.  in the observation
-decks and glass-roofed wards to watch our arrival.  For the first
time, it occurred to me that this flight of the Morning Star really was
something of an event An the radio and TV networks would be covering it
As a news story, it had everything-a race for life and a gallant effort
by a long-retired ship.  When we reached the hospital, we would have to
run the gantlet.

The rocket tractors came fuming up to us and the tow.  ropes started to
haul us in.  A few minutes later the air locks clamped together, and We
were able to go through the conneCting tube into the hospital.  We
waited for the doctor and his still unconscious Patient to go first,
then went reluctantly forward to meet the crowd waiting to welcome
us.

I Well, I wouldn't have missed it for anything, and pm sure the
commander enjoyed it as much as any of us.  They made a huge fuss, and
treated us like heroes.  Although I hadn't done a thing and really had
no right to be there at all (there were some rather awkward questions
about that), I was treated just like the others.  We were, in fact,
given the run of the place.

It seemed that we would have to wait there for two days before.  we
could go back to the Inner Station because there was no earthbound ship
until then.

Of course, we could have made the return trip in the Morning Star,
but

Commander Doyle vetoed this.

"I don't mind tempting providence once," he said, "but I'm not going to
do it again.  Before the old lady makes another trip, she's going to be
overhauled and the motors tested.  I don't know if you noticed it, but
the combustion Chamber temperature was starting to rise unpleasantly
While we were doing our final approach.  And there were about six other
things that weren't all they should have been.  I'm not going to be a
hero twice in one week.  The second time might be the lastl"

It was, I suppose, a reasonable attitude, but we were a little
-disappointed.  Because of this caution, the Morning Star didn't get
back to her usual parking place for almost a month, to the great
annoyance of her patrons.

Hospitals are, I think, usually slightly depressing places, but this
one, was different Few of the patients here were seriously a though
down on earth most of them % would have been dead or completely
disabled, owing to the effect of gravity on their weakened hearts. Many
were eventually able to return to earth, others could live safely only
on the MOOn Or Mars, and the severest cases had to remain permanently
on the station.  It was a kind of exile, but they seemed cheerful
enough.  The hospital was a huge place, ablaze with sunshine, and
almost everything that could be found on earth was
available.-eveUthing, that is, that did not depend on gravity.

Only about half of the station was taken up by the hosPital; the
remainder was devoted to research of various Ends.  We were given some
interesting conducted tours of the gleaming, spotless labs.  And on one
of these tours -well, this Is what happened.  ,

The commander was away on some business in the Technical Section, but
we had been invited to visit the Biology Department, which, we were
promised, would be, highly interesting.  As It turned out, this was an
understatement.

Wed been told to meet a Dr.  Hawkins on Corridor Mine, Biology Two. Now
it's very easy to get lost in a space station-since all the local
inhabitants know their way around perfectly, no one bothers with sign
posts  We found our way to what we thought was Corridor Nine, but
couldn7t see any door labelod

"Biology Two."  However, there was a "Biophysics Two," and after some
discussion we decided that would be near enough.  There would certainly
be someone inside who could redirect us.  "Mr.  Benton was in front and
opened the door canflously.

"Can't see a thing," he grumbled.  Phew-it smells like a fishmongers on
a hot dayl"

I peered over his shoulder.  The light was very dim, and I could make
out only a few vague shapes.  It was also very warm and moist, with
sprays hissing continuously on all sides.  There was a peculiar odor
that I couldn't identify, a cross between a zoo and a hothoum

"This place is no good," said Ronnie Jordan in disgust "Let's try
somewhere else."

"Just a minute," exclaimed Norman, whose eyes must have become
accustomed to the gloom more quickly than mine.  "What do you think!
They've got a tree in here.  At least, it looks like it, though his a
mighty queer one."

He moved forward, and we drifted after him, drawn by the same
curiosity.  I realized that my companions probably hadn't seen a tree
or even a blade of gras for many months.  It would be quite a novelty
to them.

I could see better now.  We were in a very large room, with jars and
glass-fronted cages all around us.  The air was full of mist from
countless sprays, and I felt as if we were in some tropical jungle.
There were clusters of lamps all around, but they were turned off and
we couldn't see the switches.

About forty feet away was the tree that Norman had noticed.  It was
certainly an unusual object.  A slender, straight trunk rose out of a
metal box to which were attached various tubes and pumps.  There were
no leaves, only a dozen thin, tapering branches drooping straight down,
giving it a slightly disconsolate air.  It looked like a weeping willow
that had been stripped of all its foliage.  A continual stream of water
played over it from clusters.  of jets, adding to the general moistness
of the air.  I was beginning to find it difficult to breathe.

"It can't be from earth," said Tim, "and I've never heard of anything
like it on Mars or Venus."

We had now drifted to within a few feet of the object, and the closer
we got, the less I liked it.  I said so, but Norman only laughed.

His laugh turned to a yell of pure fright.  For suddenly that slender
trunk leaned toward us, and the long branches shot out like whips.  One
curled around my ankle, another grasped my waist.  I was too scared
even to yell.

I realized, too late, that this wasn't a tree at all-and that its
"branches" were tentacles.

1,; i~;!:

7 WORLD OF MONSTERS

--------MY REACTION WAS INSTrNcTrvE and violent.  Though I was floating
in mid-air and so unable to get hold of anything solid, I could still
thrash around pretty effectively.  The others were doing the same, and
presently I came into contact with the floor so that I was able to give
a mighty ldcL The thin tentacles released their grip as I shot toward
the ceiling.  I just managed to grasp one of the light fittings in time
to stop myself from crashing into the roof, and then looked down to see
what had happened to the others.

They had all got clear, and now that my fright was subsiding I realized
how feeble those clutching tentacles had really been.  If we had been
on solid ground with gravity to help us, we could have disengaged
ourselves without any trouble.  Even here, none of us had been hurt,
but we were all badly scared.

"What the devil is it?' gasped TIm when he had recovered his breath and
untangled himself from some rub her tubing draped along the wall.
Everyone else was too shaken to answer.  We were making our way,
unsteadily to the door when there was a sudden flood of light, and
someone called out, "What's all the noise?"  A door opened and a
white-smocked man came drifting in.  He stared at us for a moment and
said:

"I hope you haven't been teasing Cuthbert."

"Teasing!"  spluttered Norman.  "I've never had such a fright in my
life.  We were looking for Dr.  Hawkins and ran into this-this monster
from Mars or whatever it is."

The other chuckled.  He launched himself away from the door and floated
toward the now motionless cluster of tentacles.

"Look out!"  cried Tim.

We watched in fascinated horror.  As soon as the man was within range,
the slim tendrils struck out again and whipped round his body.  He
merely put up an arm- to protect his face, but made no other movement
to save himself.

"I'm afraid Cuthbert isn't very bright," he said.  "He assumes that
anything that comes near him is food and grabs for it.  But we're not
very digestible, so he soon lets go-like this."

he tentacles were already relaxing.  With a gesture exactly like
disdain, they thrust away their captive, who burst out laughing at our
startled faces.

"He's not very strong, either.  It would be quite easy to get away from
him, even if he wanted to keep you."

"I still don't think it's safe to leave a beast like that around,"
said

Norman with dignity.  "What is it, anyway?  Which planet does it come
from?"

"You'd be surprised-but IT let Dr.  Hawkins explain that.  He sent me
to look for you when you didn't turn up.  And I'm sorry that Cuthbert
gave you such a fright.  That door should have been locked, but
someone's been careless again."

And that was all the consolation we got.  I'm afraid our mishap had
left us in the wrong mood for conducted tours and scientific
explanations, but despite this bad start we found the Biology Labs
quite interesting.  Doctor

Hawkins, who was in charge of research here, told us about the work
that was going on and about some of the exciting prospects that low
gravity had opened up in the way of lengthening the span of life.

"Down on earth," he said, "our hearts have to fight gravity from the
moment we're born.  Blood is hem~g continually pumped round the body,
from head to foot and back again.  Only when we're lying down does the
heart really get a good rest, and even for the laziest people that's
only about a third of their lives.  But here, the heart has no work at
all to do against gravity."

"Then why doesn't it race, like an engine that has no load?"  asked
Tim.

"That's a good question.  The answer is that natures provided a
wonderful automatic regulator.  And there's still quite a bit of work
to be done against friction, in the veins and arteries.  We don't know
yet just what difference zero gravity's going to make, because we
haven't been in space long enough.  But we think that the expectation
of life out here ought to be well over a hundred years.  It may even be
as much, as that on the moon.  If we can prove this, it may start all
the old folks rushing away from the earth!

"Still, all this is guesswork.  Now I'm going to show you something
which I think is just as exciting."

He had led us into a room whose walls consisted almost entirely of
glass cages, full of creatures which at first sight I could not
identify.  Then I gave a gasp of astonishment.

"They're flies!  But where did they come from?"

They were flies, all right.  Only one thing was wrong these flies had a
wing span of a foot or more.

Doctor Hawkins chuckled.

"Lack of gravity, again, plus 4 few special hormones.  Down on earth,
you know, an animal's weight has a major effect on controlling its
size.  A fly this size couldn't possibly lift itself into the air. It's
odd to watch these flying,.  you can see the wing beats quite
easily."

"What kind of flies are they?"  asked Tim.

"Drosophila-fruit flies.  They breed rapidly, and have been studied on
earth for about a century and a halt I can trace this fellow's family
tree back to around 19201"

Personally, I could think of much more exciting occupations, but
presumably the biologists knew what they were doing.  Certainly the
final result was highly impressive-and unpleasant.  Flies aren't pretty
creatures, even when normal size.

"Now here's a bit of a contrast," said Dr.  Hawkins, making some
adjustments to a large projection microscope.  "Yqu can just about see
this chap with the naked eye-in the ordinary way, that is."

He flicked a switch, and a circle of light flashed on the screen.  We
were looking into a tiny drop of water, with strange blobs of jelly and
minute living creatures drifting through the field of vision.  And
there in the center of the picture, waving its tentacles lazily, was
... "Why," exclaimed Ron, "that's like the -creature that caught US."
16y lite right," replied Dr.  Hawkins.  "It's called a on re qui hydra,
and a big one is only about a tenth of an inch long.  So you see

Cuthbert didn't come from Mars or Venus, but was brought from Earth.

Increasing his size is our most lFanbitious experiment yet."

I 93ut what's the, idea?"  asked Tim.

"Well, you can study these creatures much more easily when they're
large.

Our knowledge of living matter has been extended enormously since we've
been able to do this sort of thing.  I must admit, though, that we
rather overdid it with Cuthbert.  It takes a lot of effort to keep him
alive, and we're not likely to try and beat this record."

After that, we were taken to see Cuthbert again.  The lights were
switched on this time; it seemed that we'd stumbled into the lab during
one of the short periods of artificial "night."  Though we knew that
the creature was safe, we, wouldn go very close.  Tim Benton, however,
was persuaded to offer a piece of raw meat, which was grabbed by a slim
tentacle and tucked into the top of the long, slender "trunk."

"I should have explained," said Dr.  Hawkins, "that hydras normally
paralyze their victims by stinging them.  There are poison buds all
along, those tentacles, but we've been able to neutralize them.

Otherwise, Cuthbert would be as dangerous as a cageful of cobras."

I felt like saying I didn't really think much of their taste in pets,
but

I remembered in time that we were guests.

Another high light of our stay at the hospital was the visit to the
Gravity

Section.  I've already mentioned that some of the space stations
produce a kind of artificial gravity by spinning slowly on their axes.
Inside the hospital they had a huge drum, or centrifuge, that did the
same thing.  We were given a ride in it, partly for fun and partly as a
serious test of our reactions to having weight again.

The gravity chamber was a cylinder about fifty feet in diameter,
supported ofi pivots at either end and driven by electric motors.  We
entered through a hatch in the side and found ourselves in a small room
that would have seemed perfectly normal down on earth.  There were
pictures hanging from the walls, and even an electric light fixture
suspended from the "ceiling."

Everything had been done to create an impression, as far as the eye was
concerned, that "up" and "down" existed again.

We sat in the comfortable chairs and waited.  Presently there was a
gentle vibration and a sense of movement: the chamber was beginning to
turn.  Very slowly, a feeling of heaviness began to steal over me.  My
legs and arms required an effort to move them: I was a slave of gravity
again, no longer able to glide through the air as freely as a bird....
A concealed loud-speaker gave us our instructions.

"We'll hold the, speed constant now.  Get up and walk around-but be
careful."

I rose from my seat and almost fell back again with the effort.

"Wow!"  I exclaimed.  "How much weight have they given us?  I feel as
if I'm on Jupiter!"

My words must have been picked up by the operator, because the
loud-speaker gave a chuckle.

"You're just half the weight you were back on earth.

But it seems considerable, doesn't it, after you've had none at all for
a couple of weeksl" '

It was a thought that made me feel rather unhappy.  When I got down to
earth again, I'd weigh twice as much as thisl Our instructor must have
guessed my thoughts.

"No need to worry.  You get used to it quickly enough on the way out,
and it will be the same on the way back.  You'll just have to take
things easy for a few days when You get down to earth, and try and
remember that you can't jump out of top-floor windows and float gently
to the ground."

Put that way, it sounded silly, but this was just the sort of thing I'd
grown accustomed to doing here.  I wondered how many spacemen broke
their necks when they got back to earth!  In the centrifuge, we tried
out all the tricks' that were impossible under zero gravity.  It was
funny to watch Hquids pour in a thin stream and remain quietly at the
bottom of a glass.  I kept on making little lumps, just for the novel
experience of coming down quickly again in the same place.

Finally we were ordered back to our seats, the brakes were put on, and
the spin of the chamber was stopped.  We were weightless again-back to
normal!

I wish we could have stayed in the Hospital Station for a week or so,
in order to explore the place thoroughly.  It had everything that the
Inner

Station lacked, and my companions, who hadn't been to earth for months,
appreciated the luxury even more than I did.  It was strange seeing
shops and gardens and even going to the theater.  That was an
unforgettable experience.  Thanks to the absence of gravity, one could
pack a large audience into a small space and everyone could get a good
view.  But it created a very difficult problem for the producer, as he
had to give an illusion of gravity somehow.  It wouldn't do in a
Shakespeare play for all the characters to be floating around in
mid-air.  So the actors had to use magnetic shoes -a favorite dodge of
the old science fiction writers, though this was the only time I ever
found them used in reality.

The play we saw was Macbeth.  Personally, I don't care for Shakespeare
and I went along only because we'd been invited and it would have been
rude to stay away.  But'l was glad I went, if only because it was
interesting to see how the patients were enjoying themselves.  And not
many people can claim that they've seen.  Lady Macbeth, jn the
sleepwalking scene, coming down the stairs with magnetic shoesl ,
Another reason why I was In no great hurry to return to the Inner
Station was simply this-in three days' time I'd have to go aboard the
freighter scheduled to take me home.  Although I'd been mighty lucky to
get out here to the Space Hospital, there were still many things I
hadn't seen.  There were the Met Stations, the great observatories with
their huge, floating telescopes and the Relay Stations, another seven
thousand miles farther out into space.  Well, they would simply have to
wait for another time.

Before the ferry rocket arrived to take -us home, we had the
satisfaction of knowing that our mission had been successful.  The
patient was off the danger list, and had a good chance of making a
complete recovery.  But-and this certainly gave the whole thing an
ironic twist-it wouldn't be safe for him to go down to earth.  He'd
come all these scores of millions of miles for nothing.  The best he
could do would be to look down on earth through observation telescopes,
watching the green fields on which he could 'never walk again.  When
his convalescence was over, he'd have to go back to Mars and its lower
gravity.

The ferry rocket that came up to fetch us home had been diverted from
its normal run between the Observatory Stations.  When we went aboard,
Tim

Benton was still arguing with the commander.  No-arguing wasn't the
right word.  No one did that with Commander Doyle.  But he was saying,
very wistfully, that it really was a great pity that we couldn't go
back in the

Morning Star.  The commander only grinned.  "Wait until you see the
report of her overhaul," he advised.  "Then you may change your mind. I
bet she needs new tube linings, at the very least.  III feel a bit
happier in a ship that's a hundred years youngerl"

SO, as things turned out, I'm pretty sure the commander wished he'd
listened to us.... It was the first time I'd been aboard one of the low
powered inter-orbit ferries, unless one includes our home built Skylark
of Space in this category.  The control cabin was much like that of any
other spaceship, but from the outside the vessel looked very peculiar. 
It had been built here in space and, of course, had no streamlining or
fins.  The cabin was roughly egg-shaped, and connected by three open
girders to the fuel tanks and rocket motors.  Most of the freight was
not taken inside the ship, but was simply lashed to, what were rather
appropriately called the "luggage racks," a series of wire mesh nets
supported on struts.  For stores that had to be kept under normal
pressure, there was a small hold with a second air lock just behind the
control cabin.  The whole ship had certainly been built for efficiency
rather than beauty.

The pilot was waiting for us when we went aboard, and Commander Doyle
spent some time discussing our course with him.

"That's not his job," Norman whispered in my ear, "but the old boy's so
glad to be out in space again that he can't help it."  I was going to
say that I thought the commander spent all his time in space; then I
realized that from some points of view his office aboard the Inner
Station wasn't so very different from an office down on earth.

We had nearly an hour before take-off, ample time for all the checks
and last-minute adjustments that would be needed.  I got into the bunk
nearest to the observation port, so that I could look back at the
hospital as we dropped away from its orbit and fell down toward earth.
It was hard to believe that this great blossom of glass and
plastic--floating here in space with the sun pouring into its wards,
laboratories and observation decks---was really spinning round the
world at eight thousand miles an hour.  As I waited for the voyage to
begin, I remembered the attempts I'd had to explain the spare stations
to Mom.  Like a lot of people, she could never really understand why
they "didn't fall down."

"Look, mom," I'd said, "they're moving mighty fast, going around the
earth in a big circle.  And when anything moves like this, you get
centrifugal force.  Ifs just the same when you whirl a stone at the end
of a string."  I

"I don't whirl stones on the end of strings," _said Mom, "and I hope
you won't either, at least not indoors."

"I was only giving an example," I had told her.  "It's the one they
always use at school.  Just as the stone can't fly away because of the
pull in the string, so a space station has to stay there because of the
pull of gravity.  Once it's given the right speed, it'll stay there
forever without using any power.  It can't lose speed because thereN no
air resistance.  Of course, the speed's got to be calculated carefully.
Near the earth, where gravity's powerful, a station has to move fast to
stay up.  It's like t3thing your stone on to a short piece of string;
you have to whirl it quickly.  But a long way out, where gravity's
weaker, the stations can move slowly."

"I thought it was something, like that," she replied.  "But what
worries me is this-suppose one of the stations did lose a bit of speed.
Wouldn't it come falling down?  The whole thing looks dangerous to me.
It seems a sort of balancing act.  If anything goes wrong - ."

I hadn't known the answer then, so I'd only been able to say: "Well,
the moon doesn't fall down, and it stays up just the same way."  It
wasn't until I'd got to the Inner

Station that I learned the answer, though I. should have been able to
work it out for myself.  If the velocity of a space station did drop a
bit, it would simply move into a closer orbit.  You'd have to carve off
quite a lot of its speed before it came dangerously close to earth, and
it would take a vast amount of rocket braking to do this.  It couldn't
possibly happen by accident.

Now I looked at the clock.  Another thirty minutes to go.  Funny-why do
I feel -so sleepy now?  I had a good rest last night.  Perhaps the
excitements been a bit too much.  Well, let's just relax and take
things easy-there's nothing to do until we reach the Inner Station in
four hours' time.  Or is it four days?  I really can't remember,

but, anyway, it isn't important.  Nothing is important any more, not
even the fact that everything around me is half hidden in a pink
mist.... Then I heard Commander Doyle shouting.  He sounded miles away,
and though

I had an idea that the words he was calling should mean something, I
didn't know what it was.  They were still ringing vainly in my ears
when I blacked out completely: "Emergency Oxygen!"

8 INTO THE ABYSS

IT was one of those peculiar dreams when you know you're dreaming and
can't do anything about it.  Everything that had happened to me in the
last few weeks was all muddled up together, as well as flash backs from
earlier experiences.  Sometimes things were quite the wrong way round. 
I was down on earth, but weightless, floating like a cloud over valleys
and hills.  Or else

I was up in the Inner Station, but had to struggle against gravity
with' every movement I made.

The dream ended in nightmare.  I was taking a -short cat through the
Inner

Station, using an illegal but widely practiced method that Norman
Powell had shown me.  Linking the central part of the station with its
outlying pressurized chambers are ventilating ducts, wide enough to
take-a man.  The air moves through them at quite a speed, and there are
places where one can enter and get a free ride.  It's an exciting
experience, and you.  have to know just what you're doing or you may
miss the exit and have to buck the air stream to find a way back. 
well, in this dream I was riding the air stream and had lost my way. 
There ahead of me I -could seethe great blades of the ventilating fan,
sucking me down toward them.  And the protecting grille was gonel In a
few seconds I'd be sliced like a side of bacon..  i .

"He's all right," I heard someone say.  "He was only out fora minute.
Give him another sniff."

A jet of cold gas played over my face, and I tried to jerk my head out
of the way.  Then I opened my eyes and realized where I was.

"What happened?"  I asked, still feeling rather dazed.

Tim Benton was sitting beside me, an oxygen cylinder in his hand.  He
didn't look in the least upset.

"We're -not quite sure," he said.  "But it's O.K. now.  A change-over
valve must have jammed in the oxygen supply when one of the tanks got
empty.  You were the only one who passed out, and we've managed to
clear the trouble by bashing the oxygen distributor with a hammer.
Crude, but it usually works.

Of course, it will have to be stripped down when we get back, and
someone will have to find out why the alarm didn't work."

I still felt rather muzzy and a little ashamed of myself for fainting,
though that wasn't the kind of thing anyone could help.  And, after
all, I had acted as a sort of human guinea pig to warn the others.  Or
perhaps a better analogy would be one of the canaries the old-time
miners took with them to test the air underground.

"Does this sort of thing happen very of tenT I asked.

"Very seldom," replied Norman Powell.  For once he looked serious. "But
there are so many gadgets in a spaceship that you've always got to keep
on your toes.  In a hundred years we haven't got all the bugs Out Of
spaceflight.  If it isn't one thing, it's another."

"Don't be so glum, Norman," said Tim.  "We've had our share of trouble
for this trip.  It'll be plain sailing now."

As it turned out, that remark was about the most un- 3

fortunate that Tim ever made.  I'm sure the others never gave him a
chance to forget it.

We were now several miles from the hospital, far enough away to avoid
our jet doing any damage to it.  The pilot had set his controls and was
waiting for the calculated moment to start firing, and everyone else
was lying down in his bunk.  The acceleration would be too weak to be
anything of a strain, but we were supposed, to keep out of the pilot's
way at blast-off and there was simply nowhere else to go.

The motors roared for nearly two minutes.  At the' end of that time
the, hospital was a tiny, brilliant toy twenty or thirty miles away. 
If the pilot had done his job properly, we were now dropping down on a
long curve that would take us back to the Inner Station.  We had
nothing to do but sit and wait for the next three and a half hours,
while the earth grew bigger and bigger until it once more filled almost
half the sky.

On the way out, because of our patient we hadn't been able to talk, but
there was nothing to stop us now.  There was a curious kind of elation,
even lightheadedness, about our little party.  If I'd stopped to think
about it,

I should have realized that there was something odd in the way we were
all laughing and joking.  At the time, though, it seemed natural
enough.

Even the commander unbent more than I'd ever known him to before-not
that he was ever really very formidable, once you'd got used to him.
But he never talked about himself, and back at the Inner Station no one
would have dreamed of asking him to tell the story of his part in the
first expedition to Mercury.  And if they had, he certainly wouldn't
have done so-yet he did now.  He grumbled for a while, but not very
effectively.  Then he began to talL

"Where shall I start?"  he mused.  "Well, the res not much.  to say
about the voyage itself-it was just like any other trip.  No one else
had ever been so near the sun before, but the mirror-plating of our
ship worked perfectly and stopped us getting too hot by bouncing eighty
percent of the sun's rays straight off again.

"Our instructions were not to attempt a landing unless we were quite
sure it would be safe.  So we got into an Orbit a thousand miles up and
began to do a careful smvey.

"You know, of course, that Mercury always keeps one face turned toward
the sun, so that it hasn't days or nights as we have on earth.  One
side is in perpetual darkness, the other in blazing light However,
there's a narrow 'twilight' zone between the two hemispheres, where the
temperature isn't too extreme.  We planned to come down somewhere in
this region, if we could find a good landing place.  "Ve had our first
surprise when we looked at the day side of the planet.

Somehow, everyone had always finapined that it would be very much like
the moon-covered with jagged craters and mountain ranges.  But it
wasn't There are no mountains at all on the part of Mercury directly
facing the sun, only a few low hills and great, cracked plains.  When
we thought about it, the reason was obvious.  The temperature down
there in that perpetual sunlight is over seven hundred degrees
Fahrenheit That's much too low to melt rock, but it can soften it, and
gravity had done the rest.  Over millions of

Years, any mountains that might have existed on the day side of Mercury
had slowly collapsed, just as a block of pitch flows on a hot day. Only
round the rim of the night land, where the temperature was far lower,
were there any real mountains.

"Our second Surprise was to discover that there were lakes down in that
blazing inferno.  Of course, they weren't lakes of water but of molten
metal.  Since no one has been able to rea~i them yet, we don't know
what metals they are-probably lead and tin, with other things mixed up
with them.  Lakes of solder, in fact They may be pretty valuable one
day, if we can discover how to tap them."

The commander nodded his head thoughtfully, before continuing "As
you'll guess from this, we wereWt anxious to land anywhere in the
middle of the day side.  So when wed completed a photographic map we
had a look at the night land.

"The only way we could do that was to illuminate it with flares.  We
went as close as we dared, less than a hundred miles up, and shot off
billion candle power markers one after another, taking photographs as
we did so.

The flares, of course, shared our speed and traveled along with us
until they burned out.

"It was a strange experience, knowing that we were shedding light on a
land that had never seen the suna land where the' only light for maybe
millions of years had been that of the stars.  If there was any life
down there-which seemed about as unlikely as anything could be-it must
be having quite a sur prisel At least, that was my first thought as I
watched our flares blasting that hidden land with their brilliance.
Then I decided that any creatures of the night land would probably be
completely blind, like the fish of our own ocean depths.  Still, all
this was fantasy.  Nothing could possibly live down there in that
perpetual darkness, at a temperature of almost four hundred degrees
below freezing point.  We know better, now, of course."  He smiled.

"It was nearly a week before we risked a landing, and by that time we'd
mapped the surface of the planet pretty thoroughly.  The night land,
and much of the twilight zone, is fairly mountainous, but there were
plenty of flat regions that looked promising.  We finally chose a
large, shallow bowl on the edge of the day side.

"There's a trace of atmosphere on Mercury, but not enough for wings or
parachutes to be of any use.  So we had to land by rocket braking, just
as you do on the moon.  However often you do it, a rocket touchdown is
always a bit unnerving, especially on a new world where you can't be
perfectly sure that what looks like rock is anything of the sort.

"Well, it was rock, not one of those treacherous dust drifts they have
on the moon.  The landing gear took up the impact so thoroughly that we
hardly noticed it in the cabin.  Then the motors cut out automatically
and we were down, the first men to land on

Mercury.  The first living creatures, probably, ever to touch the
planet

"I said that we'd come down at the frontiers of the day side.  That
meant that the sun was a great, blindiqg disk right on the horizon.  it
was strange^ seeing it almost fixed there, never rising or setting
though, because Mercury has a very eccentric orbit, the sun does wobble
to and fro through a considerable arc in' the sky.  Still, it never
dropped be law the horizon, and I always had the feeling that it was
late afternoon and that night would fall shortly.  It was hard to
realize that 'night?  and 'day' didnt mean anything here.... "Exploring
a new world sounds exciting, and so it is, I suppose.  But it's also
hard work-and dangerous, especially on a planet like Mercury.  Our
first job was to see that the ship couldn't get overheated, and we'd
brought along some protective awnings for this purpose.  Our
'sunshades," we called them.  They looked peculiar, but they did the
job properly.  We even had portable ones, like flimsy tents, to protect
us if we stayed out in the open for any length of time.  They were made
of white nylon and reflected most of the sunlight, though they let
through enough to provide all the warmth and light we wanted.

"We spent several weeks reconnoitering the day side, traveling up to
twenty miles from the ship.  That may not sound very far, but it's
quite a distance when you've got to wear a space suit and carry all
your supplies.  We collected hundreds of mineral specimens and took
thousands of readings with our instruments, sending back all the
results we could, by tight-beam radio to earth.  It was fin possible to
go far enough into the day side to reach the lakes wed seen.  The
nearest was over eight hundred miles away, and -we couldn't afford the
rocket fuel to go hopping around the planet.  In any case, it would
have been far too dangerous to go into that blazing furnace with our
present, untried equipment."

The commander paused, staring thoughtfully into space as if he could
see beyond our cramped little cabin to.  the burning deserts of that
distant world.

"Yes," he continued at last, "Mercury's quite a challenge.  We can deal
with cold easily enough, but heat's another problem.  I suppose I
shouldn't say that, because it was the cold-that got me, not the
heat... "The one thing we, never expected to &d on Mercury was life,
though the moon should have taught us a lesson.  No one had expected to
find it there, either.  And if anyone had said to me, "Assuming that
there is life on

Mercury, where would you hope to find it?"  I'd have replied, "Why, in
the twilight zone, of course!  I'd have been wrong again.

"Though no one was very keen on the idea, we decided we ought to have
at least one good look at -the night land.  We had to move the ship
about a hundred miles to get clear of the twilight zone, and we landed
on a low, flat hill a few miles from an interesting-looking range of
mountains.  We spent an anxious twenty-four hours before we were sure
that it was safe to stay.  The rock on which the ship was standing had
a temperature of minus three hundred and fifty degrees, but our heaters
could handle the situation.  Even without them on, the temperature in
the ship dropped very slowly, because there was a near vacuum around us
and our silvered walls reflected back most of the heat we'd lose by
radiation.  We were living, in fact, inside a large thermos flask, and
our bodies were also generating quite a bit-of heat.

"Still, we couldn't learn much merely by sitting inside the ship; we
had to put on our space suits and go out into the open.  The suits we
were using had been tested pretty thoroughly on the moon during the
lunar night, which is almost as cold as it is on Mercury.  But no test
is ever quite like the real thing.  That was why three of us went out.
If one man got into trouble, the other two could get him back to the
ship-we hoped.

"I was in that first party.  We walked slowly round for about.  thirty
minutes, taking things easily and reporting to the ship by radio.  It
wasn't as dark as we'd expected,

thanks to Venus.  She was hanging up there against the stars,
incredibly brilliant and casting easily visible shadows.  Indeed, she
was too boght to look at directly for more than a few seconds, and
then, using a filter to cut down the glare, one could easily see the
tiny disk of the planet.

"The earth and moon were also visible, forming a beautiful double star
just above the horizon.  They also gave quite a lot of light, so we
were never in complete darkness.  But neither Venus nor earth gave the
slightest heat to this frozen land.

"We couldn't lose the ship, because it was the most prominent object
for miles around and we'd also fixed a powerful beacon on its nose.
With some difficulty we broke off a few small specimens of rock and
carried them back with us.  As soon as we took them into the air lock,
an extraordinary thing happened.  They became instantly covered with
frost, and drops of liquid began to form on them, dripping off to the
floor and evaporating again.  It was the air in the ship condensing on
the bitterly cold fragments of stone.

We had to wait half an hour before they had become sufficiently warm to
handle.

"Once we were sure that our suits could withstand the conditions in the
night land, we made longer trips, though we were never away from the
Ship for more than a couple of hours.  We hadn't reached the mountains
yet-they were just out of range.  I used to spend a good deal of time
examining them through the electronic telescope in the ship.

There was enough light to make this possible.

"Then, one day, I saw something moving.  I was so astonished that for a
moment I sat frozen at the telescope, gaping foolishly through the
eyepiece.  Then I regained enough presence of mind to switch on the
camera.

"You must have seen the film.  It's not very good, of course, because
the light was so weak.  But it shows the mountain wall with a sort of
landslide in the foreground and something large and white scrabbling
round the rocks.

When I saw it first it looked like a ghost and I don't mind saying that
it scared me.  Then the thrill of discovery banished every other
feeling, and I concentrated on observing as much as I could.

"It wasn't a great deal, but I got the general impression of a roughly
spherical body with at least four legs.  Then it vanished, and it never
reappeared.

"Of course, we dropped everything else and had a council of war.  It
was lucky for me that I'd taken the film, as otherwise everyone would
have accused me of dreaming.  We all agreed that we must try and get
near the creature: the only question was whether it was dangerous.

"We had no weapons of any kind, but the ship carried a flare pistol
which was intended for signaling.  If it did nothing else, this should
frighten any beast that attacked us.  I carried the pistol, and my two
companions-Borrell, the navigator, and Glynne, the radio operator, had
a couple of stout bars.  We also carried cameras and lighting equipment
in the hope of getting some really good pictures.  We felt that three
was about the right number for the expedition.  Fewer might not be safe
and-well, if the thing was really dangerous, sending the whole crew
would only make matters worse.

"It was five miles to the mountains, and it took us about an hour to
reach them.  The ship checked our course over the radio and we had an
observer at the telescope, keeping a search in the neighborhood so that
we'd have some warning if the creature turned up.  I don't think we
felt in any danger; we were all much too excited for that.  And it was
difficult to see what harm any animal could do to us inside the armor
of our space suits as long as the helmets didn't get cracked.  The low
gravity and the extra strength that it gave us added to our
confidence.

"At last we reached the rock slide and made a peculiar discovery.
Something had been collecting stones and smashing them up; there were
piles of broken fragments lying around.  It was difficult to see 'what
this meant, unless the creature we were.  seeking actually found its
food.  among the rocks.

"I collected a few samples for analysis while Glynne photographed our .
discovery and reported to the ship.  Then we started to hunt around,
keeping quite close together in case of trouble..  The rock slide was
about a mile across, and it seemed that the whole face of the mountain
had crumbled and slid downward.  We wondered what could have caused
this, in the absence of any weather.  Since there was no erosion, we
couldn't guess how long ago the slip had occurred.  It might have been
a million years old---or a billion.  "Imagine us, then, scrambling
across that jumble of broken rocks, with

Earth and Venus hanging overhead like brilliant beacons and the lights
of our ship burning reassuringly down on the horizon.  By now I had
practically decided that our quarry must be some kind of rock eater if
only because there seemed no other kind of food on this desolate
planet.  I wished I knew enough about minerals to determine what
substance this was.

"Then Glynne's excited shout rang in my earphones.  " "There it is!" 
he yelled.  "By that cliff over the rel

"We just stood and stared, and I had my first good look at a Mercurian.
It was more like a giant spider than anything else, or perhaps one of
those crabs with long, spindly legs.  Its body was a sphere about a
yard across and was a silvery white.  At first we thought it had four
legs, but later we discovered that there were actually eight, a reserve
set being carried tucked up close to the body.  They were brought into
action when the incredible cold of the rocks began to creep too far up
the thick layers of insulating horn which formed its feet or hoofs.
When the Mercurian got cold feet, it switched to another pair!

"It also had two handling limbs, which at the moment were busily engage
ding searching among the rocks.  They ended in elaborate, horny claws
or pincers which looked as if they could be dangerous in a fight. There
was no real head, but only a tiny bulge on the top of the spherical
body.  Later we discovered that this housed two large eyes, for use in
the dim starlight of the night land and two small ones for excursions
into the more brilliantly il ill luminated twilight zone-the sensitive
large eyes then being kept tightly shut.

"We watched, fascinated, while the ungainly creature scuttled among the
rocks, pausing now and again to seize a specimen and smash it to powder
with those efficient looking claws.  Then something that might have
been a tongue would flash out, too swiftly for the eye to follow, and
the powder would be gobbled up.  ""What do you think it's afterT asked
Boffell.  "That rock seems pretty soft.  I wonder if it's some kind of
chalk?"  ""Hardly," I replied.  "It's the wrong color and chalk's only
formed at the bottom of seas, anyway.  There's never been free water on
Mercury."  ""Shall we see how close we can get?"  said Glynne.  "I
can't take a good photo from here.  It's an ugly-looking beast, but I
don't think it can do us any harm.  It'll probably run a mile as soon
as it sees us."

"I gripped the flare pistol more firmly and said, 10.K.let's go.  But
move slowly, and stop as soon as it spots us.

"We were within a hundred feet before the creature showed any signs of
interest in us.  Then it pivoted on its stalk like legs and I could see
its great eyes looking at us in the faint moonglow of Venus.  Glynne
said, "Shall I use the flash?  I can't take a good picture in this
light."

"I hesitated, then told him to go ahead.  The creature gave a start as
the brief explosion of light splashed over the landscape, and I heard
Glynne's sigh of relief.  "That's one picture in the bag, anywayl
Wonder if I can get a close-upT ""No," I ordered.  "That would
certainly scare it or annoy it, which might be worse.  I don't like the
look of those claws.  Let's try and prove that we're friends.  You stay
here and I'll go forward.  Then it won't think we're ganging up on
it."

"Well, I still think the idea was good, but I didn't know much about
the habits of Mercurians in those days'.  As I walked slowly forward
the creature seemed to stiffen, like a dog over a bone-and for the same
reason, I guessed.  It stretched itself up to its full height, which
was nearly eight feet, and then began to sway back and forth slightly,
looking very much like a captive balloon in a breeze.  ""Come backl'
advised Borrell.  "It's annoyed.  Better not take any chances."  " "I
don't intend to," I replied.  "Ifs not easy to walk backward in a space
suit, but I'm going to try it now."

"I'd retreated a few yards when, without moving from its position, the
creature suddenly whipped out one of its arms and grabbed a stone.  The
motion was so human that I 'knew what was coming and instinctively
covered my visor with my arm.  A moment later something struck the
lower part of my suit with a terrific crash.  It didn't hurt me, but
the whole carapace vibrated for a moment like a gong.  For an anxious
few seconds I held my breath, waiting for the fatal hiss of air.  But
the suit held, though I could see a deep dent on the left thigh.  "The
next time I might not be so lucky, so I decided to use my 'weapon!  as
a distraction.

"The brilliant white flare floated slowly up toward the stars, flooding
the landscape with harsh light and putting distant Venus to shame.  And
then something happened that we weren't to understand until much later.
I'd noticed a pair of bulges on either side of the Mercurfan's body,
and as we watched they opened up like the wing cases of a beetle.  Two
wide, black wings unfurled wings on this almost airless world!  I was
so astonished that for-a moment I was too surprised to continue my
retreat.  Then the flare slowly burned itself out, and as it guttered
to extinction the velvet wings folded themselves and were tucked back
into their cases.

"The creature made no attempt to follow, and we met no others on this
occasion.  As you can guess, we were sorely puzzled, and our colleagues
back in the ship could hardly credit their ears when we told them what
had happened.  Now that we know the answer, of course, it seems simple
enough.

It always does.

"Those weren1 really wings that we'd watched unfold,

though ages ago, when Mercury had an atmosphere, they had been.  The
creature I'd discovered was one of the most marvelous examples of
adaptation known in the solar system.  Its normal hoipe is the twilight
zone, but because the minerals it feeds on have been exhausted there it
has to go foraging far into the night land.  Its whole body has evolved
to resist that incredible cold.  That is the reason why it's silvery
white, because this color radiates the least amount of heat.  Even so,
it can't stay in the night land indefinitely, but has to return to the
twilight zone at intervals, just as on our own world a whale has to
come up for air.  When it sees the sun again, it spreads those black
wings,-which are really heat absorbers.  I suppose my flare must have
triggered off this reaction-or maybe even the small amount of heat
given off by it was worth grabbing.

"The search for food must be desperate for nature to have taken such
drastic steps.  The Mercurians aren't really vicious beasts, but they
have to fight among themselves for survival.  Since the hard casing of
the body is almost invulnerable, they go for the legs.  A crippled
night-lander is doomed, because he can't reach the twilight zone again
before his stores of heat are exhausted.  So they've learned to throw
stones at each other's legs with great accuracy.  My space suit must
have puzzled the specimen I met, but it did its best to'cripple.me.  As
I-soon discovered, it succeeded too well.

"We still don't know much about these creatures, despite the efforts
that have been made to study them.  And I've got a theory I'd like to
see investigated.  It seems to me that, just as some of the Mercurians;
have evolved so that they can forage into the cold of the night land,
there may be another variety that's gone into the burning day.  land. I
wonder what they'll be like?"

The commander stopped talking.  I got the impression that he didn't
really want to continue.  But our waiting silence was too much for him,
and he carried on.

"We were walking back' slowly to the ship, still arguing about the
creature we'd met, when suddenly I realized that something had gone
wrong.  My feet were getting cold, very cold.  The heat was ebbing out
of my space suit, sucked away by the frozen rocks beneath me.

"I knew at once what had happened.  The blow my suit had received had
broken the leg heater-circuits.  There was nothing that could be done
until I got back to the ship and I had four miles still ahead of me.

"I told the others what had happened and we put on all the speed we
could.

Every time my feet touched the ground I could feel that appalling chill
striking deeper.  After a while all sensation was lost; that at least
was something to be thankful for.  My legs were just wooden stumps with
no feeling at all, and I was still two miles from the ship when I
couldn't move them any more.  The joints, of the suit were freezing
cold.

"After that my companions had to carry me, and I must have lost
consciousness for a while.  I revived once while we were still some way
from the end of that journey, and for a moment I thought I must be
delirious.

For the land all around me was ablaze with light.  Brilliant colored
streamers flickered across the sky and overhead, waves of crimson fire
marched beneath the stars.  In my dazed state, it was some time before
I realized what had happened.  The Aurora, which is far more brilliant
on

Mercury than on the earth, had suddenly decided to switch on one of its
displays.  It was ironic, though at the time I could scarcely
appreciate it.

For, although the land all around me seemed to be burning, I was
swiftly freezing to death.

"Well, we made it somehow, though I don't remember ever entering the
ship.

When I came back to consciousness, we were on the way back to earth.
But my legs were still on Mercury."

No one said anything for a long time.  Then the pilot glanced at his
chronometer and exclaimed, "Wow!  I should have made my course check
ten minutes ago!"  That broke the suspense, and our imaginations came
rushing back from Mercury.

For the next few minutes the pilot was busy with the ship's
position-finding gear.  The first space navigators had only the stars
to guide them, but now -there were all sorts of radio and radar aids.
One only bothered about the rather tedious astronomical methods when a
long way from home, out of range of the earth stations.

I was watching the pilot's fingers flying across the calculator
keyboard, envying his effortless skill, when suddenly he froze over his
desk.  Then, very carefully, he pecked at the keys and set up his
calculations again.  An answer came up on the register, and I knew that
something was wrong!  For a moment the pilot stared at his figures as
if unable to believe them.  Then he loosened himself from the straps
holding him to his seat and swiftly moved over to the nearest
observation port.

I was the only one who noticed.  The others were now quietly reading in
their bunks or trying to snatch some sleep.  There was a port only a
few feet away from me and I headed for it.  Out there in space was the
earth, nearly full-the planet toward which we were slowly.  falling
Then an icy band seemed to grip my chest and for a moment I completely
stopped breathing.  By this time, I knew, earth should already be
appreciably larger as we dropped in from the orbit of the hospital. Yet
unless my eyes deceived me, it was smaller than when I had last seen
it.  I looked again at the pilot, and his face confirmed my fears.

We were heading out into space.

6 THE SHOT FROM THE MOON

-------------"COMMANDER DOYLE," said the pilot, in a very small voice.
"Will you come here a mhiute?"  The commander stirred in his bunk.

"Confound it, I was nearly asleep!"

"I'm sorry, but-well, there's been an accident.  Werewe're in an escape
orbit."  61That!"

The roar woke up everyone else.  With a mighty heave, the commander
left his bunk and headed for the control desk.  There was a rapid
conference with the unhappy pilot; then the commander ordered: "Get me
the nearest Relay

Station.  I'm taking over."

"What happened?"  I whispered to Tim Benton.

"I think I know," said Tim, "but wait'a minute before we jump to
conclusions."

It was almost a quarter of an hour before anyone bothered to explain
things to me, a quarter of an hour of furious activity, radio calls,
and lightning calculations.  Then Norman Powell, who like me had
nothing to do but watch, took pity on my ignorance.

"This ship's got a curse on it," he said in disgust.  "The pilot has
made the one navigation error you'd think was impossible.  He should
have cut our speed by point nine miles a second.  Instead, he applied
power in exactly the wrong direction and we've gained speed by that
amount So instead of falling earthward, were heading out into
space.9.9

Even to me, it seemed hard to imagine that anyone could make such an
extraordinary mistake.  Later, I discovered that it was one of those
things, like landing an aircraft with wheels up, that it isn't as
difficult to do as it sounds.  Aboard a spaceship in free orbit, the
res no way of telling in which direction and at what speed you're
moving. Everything has to be done by instruments and calculations, and
if at a certain stage a minus sign is taken for a plus, then it's easy
to point the ship in exactly the wrong direction before applying
power.

Of course, one is supposed to make other checks to prevent such
mistakes.

Somehow they hadn't worked this time or the pilot hadn't applied them.
It wasn!t until a long time later that we found the full reason.  The
jammed oxygen valve, not the unhappy pilot, was the real culprit.  I'd
been the only one who had actually fainted, but the others had All been
suffering from oxygen starvation.  It's a very dangerous complaint,
because you don't realize that there's anything wrong with you. 
Indeed, you can be snaking all sorts of stupid mistakes, yet feel that
you!  re right on top of your job.

But it was not much use finding out why the accident had happened.  The
problem now was-what should be done next?

The extra speed we'd been given was just enough' to put us into an
escape orbit.  In other words, we were traveling so fast that the earth
could never pull us back.  We were heading out into space, somewhere
beyond the orbit of the moon, and wouldn't know our exact path until we
got HAVOC to work it out for us.  Commander Doyle had radioed our
position and velocity, and now we had to wait for further
instructions.

The situation was serious, but not hopeless.  We still had a
considerable amount of fuel-the reserve intended for the approach to
the Inner Station.  if we used it now, we could at least prevent
ourselves flying away from earth, but we should then be traveling in a
new orbit that might not take us anywhere near one of the space
stations.  Whatever happened, we had to get fresh fuel from somewhere,
and as quickly as possible.  The short-range ship in which we were
traveling wasn't designed for long excursions into space and carried
only a limited oxygen supply.  We had enough for about a hundred hours.
If help couldn't reach us by that time, it would be just too bad.  It's
a funny thing, but though I was now in real danger for the Ent time,

I didn't feel half as frightened as I did when we were caught by
Cuthbert or when the "meteor" holed the classroom.  Somehow, this
seemed different We had several days' breathing space before the crisis
would be upon us.  And we all had such confidence in Commander Doyle
that we were sure he could get us out of this mess.

Though we couldn't really appreciate it at the time, there was
certainly something ironic about the fact that we'd have been quite
safe if we'd stuck to the Morning Star and not ultra-cautiously decided
to go home on another ship.

We had to wait for nearly fifteen minutes before the computing staff on
the

Inner Station worked out our new orbit and radioed it back to us.
"Commander

Doyle pjotted our path, and we all craned over his shoulder to see what
course our ship was going to follow.

"We're heading for the moon," he said, tracing out the dotted line with
his finger.  "We'll pass its orbit in about forty hours, near enough
for its gravitational field to have quite an effect.  If we want to use
some rocket braking, we can let it capture us."

"Wouldn't that be a good idea?  At least it would stop us heading out
into space."

The commander rubbed his chin thoughtfully.  "I don't know," he said.
"It depends on whether there are any ships on the moon that can come up
to us."

"Can't we land on the moon ourselves, near one of the settlements?"
asked

Norman.

"No.  We've not enough fuel for the descent.  The motors aren't
powerful enough, anyway-you ought to know that."

Norman subsided, and the cabin was filled with a long, thoughtful
silence that began to get on my nerves.  I wished I could help with
some bright ideas, but it wasn!t likely they'd be any better than
Norman's.

"The trouble is," said the commander at last, "that there are so many
factors involved.  There are several possible solutions to our
problems.

Whai we want to find is the most economical one.  Ifs going to cost a
fortune if we have to call a ship up from the moon, just to match our
speed and transfer a few tons of fuel.  That's the obvious, brute-force
answer."

It was a relief to know that there was an answer.  That was really all
that

I wanted to hear.  Someone else would have to worry about the bill.

Suddenly the pilot's face lit up.  He had been sunk in gloom until now
and hadn't contributed a word to the conversation.

I "I've got ill.  he sail.  "We should have thought of it be forel
What's wrong with using the launcher down in Hipparchus?  That should
be able to -shoot us up some fuel without any trouble, as far as one
can ten from this chart."

The conversation then grew very animated and technical, and I was
rapidly left behind.  Ten minutes later the general gloom in the cabin
began to disperse, so I guessed that some satisfactory conclusion had
been reached.

When the discussion had died away, and all the radio calls had been
made,

I got Tim into a corner and threatened to keep bothering him until he
explained what was going on.

"Surely, Roy," he said, "you know about the Hipparchus launcher?"

"Isn't it that magnetic thing that shoots fuel tanks UP to rockets
orbiting the moon?"

"Of course.  It's an electro-magnetic track about five miles long,
running east and west across the crater Hipparchus.  They chose that
spot because it's near the center of the moon's disk and the fuel
refineries aren't far away.  Ships waiting to be refueled, get into an
orbit round -the moon, and at the right time they shoot up the
containers into the same orbit.  The ship's got to do a bit of
maneuvering by' rocket power to 'home' on the tank, but it's much
cheaper than doing the whole job by rockets.  "What happens to the
empty tanks?"

"That depends on the launching speed .  Sometimes they crash back on
the moon; after all, there's plenty of room for them to come down
without doing any harm' But usually they're given lunar escape
velocity, so theY-just get lost in space.  There's even more out the
ret

"I see.  Were going near enough to the moon for a fuel tank to be shot
out to us."

"Yes; they're doing the calculations now.  Our orbit Will pass behind
the moon, about five thousand miles above the surface.  They'll match
our speed as accurately as they can with the launcher, and well have to
do the rest under our own power.  It'll mean using some of Our fuel, of
course, but the investment -will be worth it!"  -And when will all this
happen?"

"In about.  forty hours.  were waiting for the exact figures now

I was probably the only one who felt really pleased with the prospect,
now that I knew we were reasonably safe.  To the others, this was a
tedious waste of time but it was going to give me an opportunity of
seeing the moon at close quarters.  This was certainly far more than I
could have dared hope when I left earth."  The Inner Station already
seemed a long way behind me.

Hour by hour earth dwindled and the Moon grew larger in the sky
ahead.

There was very little to do, apart from routine checks of the
instruments and regular radio calls to the various space stations and
the lunar base.  Most of the time was spent sleeping and playing cards,
but once I was given a chance to speak to Mom and Pop, way back on
earth.  They sounded a bit worried, and for the first time I realized
that we were probably making headlines."  However, I think I made it
clear that I was enjoying myself and there was no real need for any
alarm.

All the, necessary arrangements had been agreed upon, and there was
nothing to do but wait until we swept past the moon and made our
appointment with the fuel container.  Though I had often watched the
moon through telescopes, both from earth and from the Inner Station, it
was a very different matter to see the great plains and mountains with
my own unaided eyes.  We were now so close that all the larger craters
were easily visible along the band dividing night from day.  The line
of sunrise had just passed the center of the disk, and it was early
dawn down there in Hipparchus, where they were preparing for our
rescue.  I asked permission to borrow the ship's telescope and peered
down into the great crater.

It seemed that I was hanging in space only fifty miles above the
moon.

Hipparchus completely filled the field of vision; it was impossible to
take it all in at once glance.  The sunlight was slanting over the
ruined walls of the crater, casting mile-long pools of inky shadow.
Here and there up-thrust peaks caught the first light of dawn and
blazed like beacons in the darkness all around them

There were other lights in the crater shadows, lights arranged in tiny,
geometric patterns-.  I was looking down on one of the lunar
settlements.

Now hidden from me in the darkness were the great chemical plants, the
pressurized domes, the spaceports and the power stations that drove the
launching track.  In a few hours they would be clearly visible as the
sun rose above the mountains, but by then we should have passed behind
the moon and the earthward side would be hidden from us.

And then I saw it, a thin bar of light stretching in a dead straight
line across the darkened plain.  I was looking at the floodlights of
the launching track, ranged like the lamps along an arterial road.  By
their illumination, space-suited engineers would be checking the great
electromagnets and seeing that the cradle ran freely in its guides. The
fuel tank would be waiting at the head of the track, already loaded and
ready to be placed on the cradle when the time arrived.

If it had been daylight down there, perhaps I could have seen the
actual launch.  There would have been a tiny speck racing along the
track, moving more and more swiftly as the generators poured their
power into the magnets.

It would leave the end of the launcher at a speed of over five thousand
miles an hour, too fast for the moon ever to pull it back.  As it
traveled almost horizontally, the surface of the moon would curve away
beneath it and it would sweep out into space to meet us, if all went
well, three hours later.

I think the most impressive moment of all my adventures came when the
ship passed behind the moon, and I saw with my own eyes the land that
had remained hidden from human sight until the coming of the rocket. It
was true that I had seen many films and photographs of the moon's other
side, and it was also true that it was very much the same as the
visible face.,

Yet soMehow the thrill remained.  I thought of all the astronomers who
had spent their lives charting the moon, but had never seen the land
over which

I was now passing.  What would they have given for the opportunity that
had now come to me, and come quite by chance, without any real effort
on my pard

I had almost forgotten earth when Tim Benton- drew my attention to it
again.  It was sinking swiftly toward the lunar horizon: the moon was
rising up to eclipse it as we swept along in our great arc.  A
blinding.  blue-green crescent, the South Polar cap almost too
brilliant to look upon, the reflection of the sun forming a pool of
fire in the Pacific Ocean-that was my home, now a quarter of, million
miles away.  I watched it drop behind the cruel lunar ~eaks until only
the faint, misiy rim was visible; then even this disappeared.  The sun
was still with us, but the earth had, gone  Until this moment it had
always been with us in the sky, part of the background of things.  Now
I had only sun, moon and stars.

The fuel container was already on its way up to Meet us.  It had been
launched an hour before, and we had been told by radio that it was
proceeding on the correct orbit.  'the moon's gravitational field would
curve its path and we would pass within a few hundred miles of it.  Our
job then was to match speeds by careful use of our remaining fuel and,
when we had coupled our ship up to the tank, pump across its contents.
Then we could turn for home and the empty container would coast on out
into space to join the rest of the debris circulating in the solar
system.

"But just suppose," I said anxiously to Norman Powell, "that they score
a direct hit on us!  After all, the whole ffring's rather' like
shooting a gun at a target.  And -we're the target."

Norman laughed.

"It'll be moving very slowly when it comes up to us, and we'll spot it
in our radar when it's a long way off.  So there's no danger of a
collision.  By the time it is really close, we'll have matched speeds
and if we bump it'll be about as violent as two snowflakes meeting head
on."

That was reassuring, though I still didn't really like the idea of this
projectile from the moon tearing up at us through space..  .

We picked up the signals from the fuel container when it was still a
thousand miles away, not with our radar, but thanks to -the tiny radio
beacon that all these missiles carried to aid their detection.  After
this

I kept out of the way while Commander Doyle and the pilot made our
rendezvous in space.  It was a delicate operation, this jockeying of a
ship until it matched the course of the still-invisible projectile. Our
fuel reserves were too slim to permit any more mistakes, and everyone
breathed a great sigh of relief when the stubby, shining cylinder was
hanging beside us."

The transfer took only about ten minutes, and when our pumps had
finished their work the earth had emerged from behind the moons shield.
It seemed a good omen.  We were once more masters of the situation and
in sight of home again.

I was watching the radar screen, because no one else wanted to use it,
when we turned on the motors again.  The empty fuel container, which
had now been uncoupled, seemed to fall slowly astern.  Actually, of
course, it was we who were falling back, checking our speed to return
earthward.  The fuel capsule would go shooting on out into space,
thrown away, now that its task was completed.

The extreme range of our radar was about five hundred miles, and I
watched the bright spot representing the fuel container drift slowly
toward the edge of the screem It was the only object near enough to
produce an echo.

The volume of space which our beams were sweeping probably contained
quite a number of meteors, but they were far too small to produce a
visible signal.  Yet there was something fascinating about watching
even this almost empty screen--empty, that is, apart from an occasional
sparkle of light caused by electrical interference.  It made me
visualize the thousand-mile-diameter globe at whose center we were
traveling.  Nothing of any size could enter that globe without our
invisible radio fingers detecting- it and giving the alarm.

We were now safely back on course, no longer racing out into space.

Commander Doyle had decided not to return directly to the Inner
Station, because our Oxygen reserve was getting low.  Instead, we would
home on one of the three Relay Stations, twenty-two thousand miles
above the earth.  The ship could be re provisioned there before we
continued the last lap of our journeY.

I was just about to switch off the I radar screen when I saw a faint
spark of light at extreme range.  It vanished a second later as our
beam moved into another sector of space, and I waited until it had
swept through the complete cycle, wondering if I'd been mistaken.  Were
there any other spaceships around here?  It was quite POssiblev of
course.

There was no doubt about it.  The spark appeared again,

in the same position.  I knew how to work the scanner controls and
stopped the beam sweeping so that it locked on to the distant echo.  It
was just under five hundred miles away, moving very slowly with respect
to us.  I looked at it thoughtfully for a few seconds and then called
Tim.  It was probably not important enough to bother the commander.
However, there was just the chance that it was a really large meteor,
and they were always worth investigating.  One that gave an echo this
size would be much too big to bring home, but we might be able to chip
bits off it for souvenirs-if we matched speed with it, of course.

Tim started the scanner going as soon as I handed over the.  controls.
He thought I'd picked up our discarded fuel container again, which
annoyed- me since it showed little faith in my common sense.  But he
soon saw that it was in zk different part of the sky and his skepticism
vanished.  It must be a spaceship," he said, "though it doesn't seem a
large enough echo for that.  Well soon find out.  If it's a ship, it'll
be carrying a radio beacon."

He tuned our receiver to the beacon frequency, but without results.
There were a few ships at great distances in other parts of the sky,
but nothing as close as this.

Norman had now joined us and was looking over TWA shoulder.

"If it's a meteor," he said, "let's hope it's a nice lump of platinum
or something equally valuable.  Then we can retire for life."

"Hey!"  I exclaimed.  '7 found it!"

"I don't think that counts.  You're not on the crew and shouldn't be
here anyway."

"Don't worry," said Tim, "no one's ever found anything except iron in
meteors, at least not in any quantity.  The most you can expect to run
across out here is a chunk of nickel steel, probably so tough that you
won~t even be able to saw off, a piece as a souvenir."

By now we had worked out the course of the object and discovered that
it would pass within twenty miles of us.  If we wished to make contact,
we'd have to change our velocity by about two hundred miles an hour-not
much, but it would waste some of our hard-won fuel and the commander
certainly wouldn't allow it, if it was merely a question of satisfying
our curiosity.

How big would it have to be to produce an echo this bright?"  I asked.
-you can't ten," said Tim.  "It depends on what i1Vs made of and which
way it's pointing.  A spaceship could produce a signal as small as
that, if we were only seeing it end on."

"I think I've found it," said Norman suddenly.  "And it &Wt a meteor.
You hive a look."

He had been searching with the ship's telescope, and I took his place
at the eyepiece, getting there just ahead of Tim.  Against a background
of faint stars a roughly cyUndrical object, brilliantly lit by the
sunlight, was very slowly revolving in space.  Even at first glance I
could see, it was artificial.  When I had watched it turn through a
complete revolution,

I could see that it was streamlined and had a pointed nose.  It looked
much more like an old-time artillery shell than a modern rocket.  The
fact that it was streamlined meant that it couldn't be an empty fuel
container from the launcher in lEpparchus; the tanks it shot up were
plain, stubby cylinders, since streamlining was no use on the airless
moon.

Commander Doyle stared through the telescope for a long time after we
called him over.  Finally, to my joy, he remarked: "Whatever it is,
we'd better have a look at it and make a report.  We can spare the
fuel, and it will only take a few minutes."

Our ship spun round in space as we began to make the course correction.
The rockets fired for a few seconds, our new path was rechecked, and
the rockets operated again.  After several shorter bursts, we had come
to within a mile of the mysterious object and began to edge toward it
under the gentle impulse of the soering jets alone.  Through all these
maneuvers it was impossible to use the ftlescope, so.  when I next saw
my discovery it was only a hundred yards beyond our port, very gently
approaching us.

It was artificial, all right, and a rocket of some kind.  What it was
doing out here near the moon we could only guess, and several theories
were put forward.  Since it was only about ten feet long, it might be
one of the automatic reconnaissance missiles sent out in the early days
of spaceflight.  Commander Doyle didn't think this likely, because as
far as he knew, they'd all been accounted for.  Besides, it seemed to
have none of the 'radio and TV equipment such missiles would carry.

It was painted a very bright red, an odd color, I thought, for anything
in space.  There was some lettering on the side-apparently in English,
though

I couldn't make out the words at this distance.  As the projectile
slowly revolved, a black pattern on a white background came into view,
but went out of sight before I could interpret it.  I waited until it
came into view again.  By this time the little rocket had drifted
considerably closer and was now only fifty feet away.

"I don't like the looks of that thing," Tim Benton said, half to
himself.

"That color, for instance, red's the sign of danger."

"Don't be an old woman," scoffed Norman.  "If it was a bomb or
something like that, it certainly wouldn't advertise the fact."

Then the pattern I'd glimpsed before swam back into view.  Even on the
first sight, there had been something uncomfortably familiar about it.
Now there was no longer any doubt.

Clearly painted on the side of the slowly approaching missile was the
symbol of death-the skull and crossbones.

 10 RADIO SATELLITE

COMMANDER DOYLE MUST HAVE seen that ominous warning as quickly as we
did, for an instant later our rockets thundered briefly.  The crimson
missile veered slowly aside and started to recede once more into space:
At its moment of closest approach, I was able to read the words painted
below the skull and crossbones-and I understood.  The notice read:

WARNINGI

RADIOACTIVE WASTE!

ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION

"I wish we had a Geiger counter on board," said the commander
thoughtfully.

"Still, by this time it can't be very dangerous and I don't expect
we've had much of a dose.  But we'll all have to have a blood count
when we get back to base."

"How long do you think ifs been up here, Sir?"  asked Norman.

"Let's think-I believe they started getting rid of dangerous waste this
way back in the 1970's.  They didn't do it for long; the space
corporations soon put a stop to it!  Nowadays, of course, we know to
deal with all the byproducts of the atomic piles, but back in the early
days there were a lot of radio isotopes they couldn't handle.  Rather a
drastic way of getting rid of them, and a shortsighted solution tool"

"I've heard about these waste containers," said Tim, "but I thought
they'd all been collected and the stuff in them buried somewhere on the
moon."

"Not this one, apparently.  But it soon will be when we report it. Good
work, Malcolml You've done your bit to make space safer!"

I was pleased at the compliment, though still a little worried lest
we'd received a dangerous dose of radiation from the decaying isotopes
in their celestial coffin.  Luckily my fears turned out to be
groundless, for we had left the neighborhood too quickly to come to any
1arm.

We also discovered, a good while later, the history of this stray
missile.

The Atomic Energy Commission is still a bit ashamed of this episode in
its history, and it was some time before it gave the whole story.
Finally it admitted the dispatch of a waste container in 1981 that had
been intended to crash on the moon but had never done so.  The
astronomers had a lot of fun working out how the thing had got into the
orbit where we found it It was a complicated story involving the
gravities of the earth, sun and moon.

Our detour had not lost us a great deal of time, and we were only a few
minutes behind schedule when we came sweeping into the orbit of Relay

Station Two, the one that sits above Latitude 30' East, over" the
middle of

Africa.  I was now used to seeing peculiar objects in space, so the
first sight of the station didn't surprise me in the least.  It
consisted of a flat, rectangular lattice-work, with one side facing the
earth.  Covering this face were hundreds of small, concave reflectors,
focusing systems that beamed the radio signals to the planet beneath,
or collected them on the way up.

We approached cautiously, making contact with the back of the station.
A pilot who let his ship pass in front of it was very unpopular, as he
might cause a temporary failure on thousands of circuits, while
blocking the radio beams.  For the whole of the planet's long-distance
services and most of the radio and TV networks were routed through the
Relay Stations.  As I looked more closely, I saw that there were two
other sets of radio reflector systems, aimed not at earth but in the
two directions sixty degrees away from it.  These were handling the
beams to the other two stations, so that altogether the three formed a
vast triangle, slowly rotating with the turning earth.

We spent only twelve hours at the Relay Station, while our ship was
overhauled and re provisioned  I never saw the pilot again, though I
heard later that he had been partly exonerated from blame.  When we
continued our interrupted journey, it was with a fresh captain, who
showed no willingness to talk about his colleague's fate.  Space pilots
form a very select and exclusive club and never let each other down or
discuss each other's mistakes, at least, not to people outside their
trade union.  I suppose you can hardly blame them, since theirs is one
of the most responsible jobs that exists.

The living arrangements aboard the Relay Station were much the same as
on the Inner Station, so I won't spend any time describing them.  In
any case, we weren't there long enough to see much of the place, and
everyone was too busy to waste time showing us around.  The TV people
did ask us to make one appearance to describe our ad ventures since
leaving the hospital.  The interview took place in a makeshift studio,
so tiny that it wouldn't hold us all, and we had to slip in quietly o
He by one when a signal was given.  It seemed funny to find no better
arrangements here at the very heart of the world's TV net work. Still,
it was reasonable enough, because a "live broadcast from the Relay
Station was a very rare event indeed.

We also had a brief glimpse of the main switch room, though I'm afraid
it didn't mean a great deal to us.  There were acres of dials and
colored lights, with men sitting here and there looking at screens and
turning knobs.  Soft voices, in every language, came through the
loudspeakers.  As we went from one operator to another we saw football
games, string quartets, air races, ice hockey, art displays, puppet
shows, grand opera--a cross section of the world's entertainment, all
depending on these three tiny metal rafts, twenty-two thousand miles up
in the sky.  As I looked at some of the programs that were going out, I
wondered if it was really worth it.

Not all the Relay Station's business was concerned with earth, by any
means.  The interplanetary circuits passed through here: if Mars wished
to call Venus, it was sometimes convenient to route messages through
the earth relays.  We listened to some of these messages, nearly all
high-speed telegraphy, so they didnt mean anything to us.  Because it
takes several minutes for radio waves to bridge the gulf between even
the nearest planets, you can't have conversation with someone on
another world.  (Except the moon-and even there you have to put up with
an annoying time-lag of nearly three seconds before you can get any
answer.) The only speech that was coming over the Martian circuit was a
talk beamed to earthlor rebroadcasting by a radio commentator.  He was
discussing local politics and the last season's crop.  It all sounded
rather dull.

Though I was there only a short time, one thing about the Relay Station
did impress me very strongly.  Everywhere else I'd been, one could look
"down" at the earth and watch it turning on its axis, bringing new
continents into view with the passing hours.  But here there was no
such change.  The earth kept the same face turned forever toward the
station.  It was true that night and day passed across the.  planet
beneath, but with every dawn and sunset, the station was still in
exactly the same place.  It was poised eternally above a spot in
Uganda, two hundred miles from Lake

Victoria.  Because of this, it was hard to believe that the station was
moving at all, though actually it was traveling round the earth at over
six thousand miles an hour.  But because it took exactly one day to
make the circuit, it would remain hanging over Africa forever -just as
the other two stations hung above the opposite coasts of the Pacific.

This was only one of the ways in which the whole atmosphere aboard
the

Relay seemed quite different from that down on the Inner Station.  The
men here were doing a job that kept them in touch with everything
happening on earth, often before earth knew it itself.  Yet they were
also on the frontiers of real space, for there was nothing else between
them and the orbit of the moon.  It was a strange situation, and I
wished I could have stayed longer.

Unless there were any more accidents, my holiday in space was coming to
an end.  I'd already missed the ship that was supposed to take me home,
but this didn't help me as much as I'd hoped.  The plan now, I
gathered, was to send me over to the Residential Station and put me
aboard the regular ferry, so that I'd be going down to earth with the
passengers homeward bound from Mars or Venus.

Our trip back to the Inner Station was uneventful and rather tedious.
We couldn't persuade Commander Doyle to tell any more stories, and I
think he was a bit ashamed of himself for being so talkative on the
outward journey.

This time, too, he was taking no chances with the pilot

It seemed like coming home when the familiar chaos of the Inner Station
swam into view.  Nothing much had changed.  Some ships had gone and
others taken their place, that was all The other apprentices were
waiting for us in the -air lock, an informal reception committee.  They
gave the commander a cheer as he came aboard, though afterward there
was a lot of good-natured leg-pulling about our various adventures.  In
particular, the fact that the

Morning Star was still out at the hospital caused nu

Inerous complaints, and we never succeeded in getting Commander Doyle
to take all the blame for this.

I spent most of my last day aboard the station collecting autographs
and souvenirs.  The best memento of my Stay was something quite
unexpected-a beautiful little model of the station, made out of plastic
and presented to me by the other boys.  It pleased me so much that I
was quite tongue-tied and didn't know how to thank them, but I guess
they realized the way I felt.

At last everything was packed, and I could only hope my luggage was
inside the weight limit.  Th ere was only one good-by left to make.

Commander Doyle was sitting at his desk, just as I'd seen him at our
first meeting.  But he wasn't so terrifying now, for I'd grown to know
and admire him.  I hoped that I'd not been too much of a nuisance and
tried to say so.

The commander grinned.

"It might have been worse," he said.  "On the whole you kept out of the
way pretty well, though you managed to get into some-ah-unexpected
places.  I'm wondering whether to send World Airways a bill for the
extra fuel you used on our little voyage.  It must come to a sizable
amount

I thought it best not to say anything, and presently he continued,
after ruffling through the papers on his desk..

"I suppose you realize, Roy, that a goodly number of youngsters apply
for jobs here and not many get them.  The qualifications are too steep.
Well,

I've kept my eye on you in the last few weeks and have noticed how
you've been shaping up.  If when you're old enough-that will be in a
couple of years, won't it?-you want to put your name down, I'll be glad
to make a recommendation."

"Why, thank you, sir!"

"Of course, there will be a tremendous amount of study to be done.
YoWve seen most of the fun and games, not the hard work.  And you've
not had to sit up here for months waiting for your leave to come along
and wondering why you ever left earth."  There was nothing I could say
to this; it was a problem that must hit the commander harder than
anyone else in the station.

He propelled himself out of his seat with his left hand, stretching out
the right one toward me.  As we shook hands, I again recalled our first
meeting.

How long ago that now seemedl And I suddenly realized that, though I'd
seen him every day, I'd almost forgotten that Commander Doyle was
legless.  He was so perfectly adapted to his surroundings that the rest
of us seemed freaks.  It was an object lesson in what will-power and
determination could do.

I had a surprise when I reached the air lock.  Though I hadn't really
given it any thought, I'd assumed that one of the normal ferry rockets
was going to take me over to the Residential Station for my rendezvous
with the ship for earth.  Instead,.  there was the ramshackle Skylark
of Space, her mooring lines drifting slackly.  I wondered what our
exclusive neighbors would think when this peculiar object arrived at
their doorsteps, and guessed that it had probably been arranged
especially to annoy them.

Tim Benton and Ronnie Jordan made up the crew and helped me get my
luggage through the air lock.  They looked doubtfully at the number of
parcels I was carrying, and asked me if I knew what interplanetary
freight charges were.

Luckily, the homeward ran is by far the cheapest, and though I had some
awkward moments, I got every, thing through.

The great revolving drum of the Residential Station slowly expanded
ahead of us: the untidy collection Of domes and pressure-corridors that
had been my home for so long dwindled astern.  Very cautiously, Tim
brought the

Skylark up to the axis of the station.  I couldn!t see exactly what
happened then, but big, jointed arms came out, to meet us and drew us
slowly in until the air locks clamped together.

"Well, so long," said Ron.  "I guess weT be seeing you again."

"I hope so," I said, wondering if I should mention

Commander Doyle's offer.  "Come and see me when you're down on earth."
"Thanks, I'll do my best.  Hope you have a good ride down."

I shook hands with them both,.  feeling pretty miserable as I did so.
Then the doors folded back, and I went through into the flying hotel
that had been my neighbor for so many days, but which I'd never visited
before.

The air lock ended in a wide circular corridor, and waiting for me was
a uniformed steward.  That at once set the tone of the place: after
having to do things for myself, I felt rather foolish as I handed over
my luggage.

And I wasn't used to being called "Sir."

I watched with interest as the steward carefully placed my property
against the wall of the corridor and told me to take my place beside
it.  Then there was a faint vibration, and I remembered the ride in the
centrifuge I'd had, back at the hospital.  The same thing was happening
here.  The corridor was starting to rotate, matching the spin of the
station, and centrifugal force was giving me weight again.  Not until
the two rates of spin were equal would I be able to go through into the
rest of the station.

Presently a buzzer sounded, and I knew that our speeds had been
matched.

The force gluing me to the curved wall was very small, but it would
increase as I got farther from the center of the station, until at the
very rim it was equal to one earth gravity.  I was in no hurry to
experience that again, after my days of complete weightlessness.

The corridor ended in a doorway which led, much to my surprise, into an
elevator cage.  There was a short ride in which curious things seemed
to happen to the vertical direction and then the door opened to reveal
a large hall.  I could hardly believe that I was not on earth.  This
might be the foyer of any luxury hotel.  There was the reception desk
with the residents making their inquiries and complaints, the uniformed
staff was hurrying to and fro and from time to time someone was being
paged over the speaker system.  Only the long, graceful bounds

C!

with which people walked revealed that, this wasn't earth.  And above
the reception desk was a large notice:

GRAvity oN THIs FLOOR=%RD EARTH

That, I realized, would make it just about right for the returning
Martian colonists.  Probably all the people around me had come from the
Red Planet, or were preparing to go there.

When I had checked in I was given a tiny room, just large enough to
hold a bed, a chair and a washbasin.  It was go strange to see freely
flowing water again that the first thing I did was to turn on the tap
and watch a pool of liquid form at the bottom of the basin.  Then I
suddenly realized that there must be baths here as well so with a whoop
of joy I set off in search of one.  I ~'-;a grown very tired of
showers, and all the bother that went with them.

So that was how I spent most of my first evening at the Residential

Station.  All around me were travelers who had come back from far
worlds with stories of strange adventures.  But they could wait until
tomorrow.  For the present I was going to enjoy one of the experiences
that gravity did make possible, lying in a mass of water which didn't
try to turn itself into a giant, drifting raindrop.

 STARLIGHT HOTEL

IT was LATe in the "evening" when I arrived aboard the Residential
Station.

Time here had been geared to the cycle of nights and days that eidsted
down on earth.  Every twenty-four hours the lights dimmed, a hushed
silence descended, and the residents went to bed.  Outside the walls of
the station the sun might be shining, or it might be in eclipse behind
the earth-2it made no difference here in this world of wide, curving
corridori6 thick carpets, soft lights and quietly whispering voices. We
had our own time and no one took any notice of the sun.  I didn!t sleep
well my first night under gravity, even though I had only a third of
the weight to which I'd been accustomed all my life.  Breathing was
difficult and I had unpleasant dreams.  Again and again I seemed to be
climbing a steep bill with a great load on my back.  My legs were
aching, my lungs panting, and the hill.  stretched endlessly ahead.
However long I toiled'J never reached the top.

At last however, I managed to doze off, and remembered nothing until a
steward woke me with breakfast, 'which I ate from a little tray fixed
over my bed.  Though I was anxious to see the station, I took my time
over this meal.  This was a novel experience which I wanted to savor to
the fullest.

Breakfast in bed was rare enough, but to have it aboard a space station
as well was really something!

When I had dressed, I started to explore my new- surroundings.  The
first thing I had to get used to was the fact that the' floors were all
curved.  (Of course, I also had to get used to the idea that there were
flobrs anyway, after doing without up and down for so long.) The reason
for this was simple enough.  I was now living on the inside of a giant
cylinder that slowly turned on its axis.  Centrifugal force, the same
force that held the station in the sky, was acting once again, gluing
me to the side of the revolving drum.  If you walked straight ahead,
you could go right round the circumference of the station and come back
to where you started.  At any point, "up," would be toward the central
axis of the cylinder, which meant that someone standing a few yards
away, farther round the curve of the station, would appear to be tilted
toward you.  Yet to them, everything would be perfectly normal and you
would be the one who was tilted!  It was confusing at first, but like
everything else, you got used to it after a while.  The designers of
the station had gone in for some clever tricks of decoration to hide
what was happening, and in the smaller rooms the curve of the floor was
too slight to be noticed.

The station wasn't merely a single cylinder, but three, one inside the
other.  As you moved out from the center, so the sense of weight
increased.

The innermost cylinder was the "One Third Earth' Gravity floor, and
because it was nearest to the air locks on the station's axis it was
devoted mainly to handling the passengers and their luggage.  There was
a saying that if you sat opposite the reception desk long enough, you'd
see everyone of importance on the foiV planets.

Surrounding this central cylinder was the more spacious "Two Thirds
Earth

Gravity" floor.  You passed from one floor to the other either by
elevators or by curiously curved stairways.  It was an odd experience,
going down one of these stairs.  At first I found it took quite a bit
of will-power, for I was not yet accustomed even to a third of my earth
weight.  As I walked slowly down the steps, gripping the handrail very
firmly, I seemed to grow steadily heavier.  Wheir I reached the floor,
my movements were so slow and leaden that I imagined that everyone was
looking at me.  However, I soon grew used to the feeling, I had to, if
I was ever going to return to earth!

Most of the passengers were on this "Two Thirds Gravity" floor Most of
them were homeward bound from Mars, and though they had been
experiencing normal earth weight for the last weeks of their
voyage-thanks to the spin of their liner-they obviously didn't like it,
yet.  They walked very gingerly, and were always finding excuses to go
"up" to the top floor, where gravity had the same value as on Mars.

I had never met any Martian colonists before, and they fascinated me.
Their clothes, their accents--everything about them had an air of
strangeness, though often it was hard to say just where the peculiarity
lay.  They all seemed to know each other by their first names.  Perhaps
that wasn't surprising after their long voyage, but later I discovered
it was just the same on Mars.  The settlements there were still small
enough for everyone to know everybody else.  They would find.  things
very different when they got to earth.

I felt a little lonely among all these strangers, and it was some time
before I made any acquaintances.  There were some small shops on the
"Two

Thirds Gravity" deck, where one could buy toilet goods and souvenirs,
and

I was exploring these when three young colonists came strolling in. The
oldest was a boy who looked about my age, and he was accompanied by two
girls who were obviously his sisters.

"Hello," he said, "you weren't on the ship."

"No," I answered.  "I've just come-over from the other half of the
station."

"what's your name?"

So blunt a request must have seemed rude or at least ill-mannered down
on earth, but by now I learned that the colonists were like that.  They
were direct and forthright and never wasted words.  I decided to behave
in the same way.

"I'm Roy Malcolm.  Who are you?"

"Oh," said one of the girls, "we read about you in the ship's
newspaper.

You've been flying round the moon, and all sorts of things."

I was quite flattered to find that they'd heard of me, but merely
shrugged my shoulders as if it wasn't anything of importance.  In any
case, I didn't want to risk showing off, as they'd traveled a lot
farther than I had.

"I'm John Moore," announced the boy, "and these are my sisters Ruby
and

May.  This is the first time we've been to earth."

"You mean you were born on Mars?"

"That's right.  We're coming home to go to college."

It sounded strange to hear that phrase "coming home from someone who'd
never set foot on earth.  I nearly asked "Can't you get a good
education on

Mars, then?"  I luckily stopped myself in time.  The colonists were,
very sensitive to criticism of their planet, even when it wasn't
intended.  They also hated the word "colonist," and you had to avoid
using it when they were around.  But you couldn!t very well call them
"Martians," for that word had to be saved for the original inhabitants
of the planet.

"We're looking for some souvenirs to take home," said Ruby.  "Don't you
think that plastic star map is beautiful?,)

"I liked that carved meteor best," I said.  "But it's an awful
price."

"How much have you got?"  said John.

1 turned Out my Pockets and did a quick calculatiorL TO MY
astonishment,

John immediately replied, "I can lend you the rest.  You can let me
have it back when we reach earth."

This was my first contact with the quick-hearted generosity which
everyone took for granted on Mars.  I couldn't possibly accept the
offer, yet didn't want to hurt John's feelings.  Luckily I had a good
excuse.

"That's fine of you," I said, "but I've just remembered that I've used
up my weight allowance.  So that settles it.  I can't take home
anything else."

I waited anxiously for a minute in case one of the Moores was willing
to lend me cargo space as well, but fortimately they must all have used
up their allowances too.

After this, it was inevitable that they took me to meet their parents.
We found them in the main lounge, puzzling their way through the
newspapers from earth.  As soon as she saw me, Mrs.  Moore exclaimed,
"What has happened to your clothesl" and for the first time I realized
that life on the Inner

Station had made quite a mess of my suit.  Before I knew what had
happened,

I'd been pushed into a brightly colored suit of John's.  It was a good
fit, but the design was startling, at least by earth standards, though
it certainly wasn't noticeable here.

We all had so much to talk about that the hours spent waiting for the,
ferry passed extremely quickly.  Life on Mars was as novel to me as
life on earth was to the, Moores.  John had a fine collection of
photographs which he'd taken, showing what it was like in the great
Pressuredomed cities and out on the colored deserts.  He'd done quite a
bit of traveling and had some wonderful pictures of Martian scenery and
life.  They were so good that I suggested he sell them to the
illustrated magazines.  He answered, in a slightly hurt voice, "I
already have."

The photograph that fascinated me most was a view over one of the great
vegetation areas-the Syrtis Major, John told me.  It had been taken
from a considerable height, looking down the slope of a wide valley.
Millions of years ago the short-lived Martian seas had rolled above
this land, and the bones of strange marine creatures were still
embedded in its rocks.  Now new life was returning to the planet.  Down
in the valley, great machines were turning up -the brick-red soil to
make way for the Colonists from earth.  In the distance I could see
acres of the socalled "Air-weed," freshly planted in neat rows.  As it
grew, this strange plant would break down the minerals in the ground
and release free oxygen, so that one day men would be able to live on
the planet without breathing masks.

Mr.  Moore was standing in the foreground, with a small Martian on
either side of him.  The little creatures were grasping his fingers
with tiny, clawlike hands and staring at the, camera with their huge,
pale eyes.  There was something rather touching about the scene.  It
seemed to dramatize the friendly contact of two races in a way that
nothing else could do.

"Why," I exclaimed suddenly, "your dad isn7t wearing a breathing
maskl"

John laughed.

"I was wondering when you'd notice that.  it be a long time before
there's enough free oxygen in the atmosphere for us to breathe it, but
some of us can manage without a mask for a couple of minutes-as long as
were not doing anything very energetic, that is."

"How do you get on with the Martians?"  I asked.  "Do you think they
had a civilization once?"

"I don't know about that," said John.  "Every so -often you hear rumors
of ruined cities out in the deserts, but they always turn out to be
hoaxes or practical jokes.  There's no evidence at all that the
Martians were ever any different from what they are today.  They're not
exactly friendly, except when they're young, but they never give any
trouble.  The adults jiftst igynore you unless you 9 get in their way.
They've got very little curiosity."

"I've read somewhere," I said, "that they behave more like rather
intelligent horses than any other animal we've got on earth."

"I wouldn't know," said John.  "I've never met a horse."

That brought me up with a jerk.  Then I realized that there couldn't be
many animals that John had met.  Earth would.  have a great many
surprises for him.

"Exactly what are YOu going to do when you get to earth?"  I asked
John.  "Apart from going to college, that is,

"Oh, we'll travel round first and have a look at the sights.  We've
seen a lot of films, you know, so we've a good idea what it's like."

I did my best to avoid a smile.  Though I'd lived in several countries,
I hadn't really seen much of earth in my whole life, and I wondered if
the

Moores really realized just, how big the planet was.  Their scales of
values must be quite different from mine.  Mars is a small planet, and
there are only limited regions where life is possible.  If you put all
the vegetation areas together, they wouldn't add up to much more than a
medium-sized country down on earth.  And, of course, the areas covered
by the pressure domes of the few cities are very much smaller still.

I decided to find out what my new friends really did know about
earth.

"Surely," I said, "there are some places you particularly want to
visit."

"Oh, yes!"  replied Ruby.  '7 want to see some forests.  Those great
trees you have-we've nothing like them on Mars.  It must be wonderful
walking beneath their branches and seeing the birds flying around."

"We've got no birds either, you see," put in May rather wistfully. "The
air's too thin for them."  '7 want to see the ocean," said John. "I'd
like to go sailing and fishing.

It's true, isn't it, that you can get so far out to sea that you can't
tell where the land is?"

"It certainly is," I replied.

Ruby gave a little shudder.

"AD that water!  It would scare me.  I should be afraid of being
lost-and

I've read that being on a boat makes you horribly sick.  ""Oh I replied
airily, "you get used to it.  Of course,

there aren't many boats now, except for pleasure.  A few hundred years
ago most of the world'p trade went by sea, until the air transport took
over.

You can hire boats at the coast resorts, though, and people who'll run
them for you."  "But is it safe?"  insisted Ruby.  "I've read that your
seas are full of horrible monsters that might come up and swallow YOU.
09

This time I couldn't help' smiling

"I shouldn't worry," I replied.  "It hardly ever hap.  pens these
days."

"What about the land animals?"  asked May.  "Some of those are quite
big, aren't they?  I've read about tigers and lions, and I know they're
dangerous.  I'm scared of meeting one of those."

Then I thought, I hope I know a bit more about Mars than you do about
earth!  I was just going to explain that man-eating tigers weren't
generally found in our cities when I caught Ruby grinning at John, and
realized that they'd been pulling my leg all the time.  After that we
all went to lunch together, in a great dining room where I felt rather
ill at ease.  I made matters worse by forgetting we were under gravity
again and spilling a glass of water on the floor.  However, every I one
laughed so good-humoredly I didn't really mind.  The only person who
was annoyed was the steward who had to mop it up.

For the rest of my short stay in the Residential Station I spent most
of my time with the Moores.  And 'it was here, surprisingly enough,
that .1 at last saw something I'd missed on my other trips.  Though Id
visited several space stations, I'd never actually watched one being
built.  We were now able to get a grandstand view of this operation
-and without bothering to wear space suits.  The Residential Station
was being extended, and from the windows at the end of the "Two Thirds
Gravity" floor we were able to see the whole fascinating process.  Here
was something that I could explain to my new friends.  I didn't tell
them that the spectacle would have been equally strange to me only two
weeks ago.

The fact that we were making one complete revolution every ten seconds
was highly confusing at first, and the girls turned rather green when
they saw the stars orbiting outside the windows.  However, the complete
absence of vibration made it easy to pretend-just as one does on earth
-that we were stationary and it was really the stars that were
revolving.

The station extension was still a mass of open girders, only partly
covered by metal sheets.  It had not yet been set spinning, for that
would have made its construction impossibly difficult.  At the moment,
it floated about half a mile away from us, with a couple of freight
rockets alongside.  When it was completed, it would be brought gent1f
up to the station and set rotating on its axis by small rocket motors.
As soon as the spins had been matched exactly, the two units would be
bolted together and the Residential

Station would have doubled its length.  The whole operation would be
rather like engaging a gigantic clutch.

As we watched, a construction gang was easing a large girder from the
hold of a ferry rocket.  The girder was about forty feet long, and
though it weighed nothing out here, its mass or inertia was unchanged.
It took a considerable effort to start it moving, and an dqual effort
to stop it again.  The men of the construction crew were working in
what were really tiny spaceships, little cylinders about ten feet. 
long fitted with low-powered rockets and steering jets.  They
maneuvered these with fascinating skill, darting forward or sideways
and coming to rest with inches to spare.  Ingenious handling mechanisms
and jointed metal arms enabled them to carry out all ordinary
assembling tasks almost as easily as if they were working with their
own hands.

The team was under the radio control of a fore manor to give him his
more dignified name, a controller-who stayed in a little pressure-hut
fixed to the girders of the partly constructed station.  Moving to and
fro or up and down under his directions, and keeping in perfect unison,
they reminded me of ~a Bock of goldfish in a pool.  Indeed,

with sunlight glinting on their armor, they did look very much like
underwater creatures.

The girder was now floating free of the ship that had brought it here
from the moon, and two of the men attached their grapples and towed it
slowly toward the station.  Much too late, it seemed to me, they began
to use their braking units.  But there was still a good six inches
between the girder and the skeleton framework when they had finished.
Then one of the men went back to help his colleagues with the
unloading, while the other eased the girder across the structure.  It
was not lying in exactly the correct line, so he had to slew it through
a slight angle as well.  Then he slipped in the bolts and began to
tighten them up.  It all looked so effortless, but I realized that
immense skill and practice must lie behind this deceptive simplicity.

Before you could go down to earth, you were supposed to spend a
twelve-hour quarantine period on the "Full Earth Gravity" floor-the
outermost of the station's three decks.  So once again I went down one
of those curving stairways, my weight increasing with every step.  When
I had reached the bottom, my legs felt very weak and wobbly.  I could
hardly believe that this was the normal force of gravity under which I
had passed my whole life..

I I

The Moores had come with me, and they felt the strain even more than I
did.

This was three times the gravity of their native Mars, and twice I had
to stop John from falling as he tottered unsteadily about.  The third
time I failed, and we both went down together.  We looked so miserable
that after a minute each started laughing at the other's expression and
our spirits quickly revived.  For a while we, sat on the thick rubber
flooring (the designers of the station had known where it would be
neededl) and got up our strength for another attempt.  This time we
didn't fall down.  Much to

John's annoyance, the' remainder of his family managed much better than
he did.

We couldn't leave the Residential Station without seeing one of its
prize exhibits.  The "Full Earth Gravity" floor had a swimming pool, a
small one, but its fame had spread throughout the solar system.

It was famous because it waWt flat.  As I've explained, since the
station's "gravity" was caused by its spin, the vertical at any spot
pointed toward the central axis.  Any free water, therefore, had a
concave surface, taking the shape of a hollow cylinder.

We couldn't resist entering the pool, not merely because once we were
floating, gravity would be less of a strain.  Though I'd become used to
many strange things in space, it was a weird feeling to stand with my
head just above the surface of the pool and to look along the water. In
one direction, parallel to the axis of the station, the surface was
quite flat.

But in the other it was curved upward on either side of me.  At the
edge of the pool, in fact, the water level was higher than my head.  I
seemed to be

Boating in the trough of a great frozen wave.  At any moment I expected
the water to come flooding down as the surface flattened itself out.
But it didn't, because it was already "flat" in this strange gravity
field.  (When

I got back to earth I made quite a mess trying to demonstrate this
effect by whirling a bucket of water round my head at the end of a
string.  If you try the same experiment, make sure you're out of
doorsf)

We could not play around in that peculiar pool as long as I would have
liked, for presently the loud-speakers began to call softly and I knew
that my time was running out All the passengers were asked to check the
packing of their luggage and to assemble in the main hall of the
station.  The colonists, I knew, were planning some kind of farewell,
and though it didn't really concern me, I felt sufficiently interested
to go along.  After talking to the Moores I'd begun to like them and to
understand their point of view a good deal better.

It was a subdued little gathering that we joined a few minutes later.
These weren't tough, confident pioneers any more.  They knew that soon
they'd be separated and in a strange world, among millions of other
human beings with totally different modes of life.  All their talk
about "going home" seemed to have evaporated; it was Mars, not earth,
they were homesick for now.

As I listened to their farewells and little speeches, r suddenly felt
very sorry for them.  And I felt sorry for myself, because in a few
hours

I too would be saying goodby to space.

 12 THE LONG FALL HOME

--------I HAD come up from earth by myself, but I was going home in
plenty of company.  There were nearly fifty passengers crowded into the
"Ove Third

Gravity" floor waiting to disembark.  That was the complement for the
first rocket: the rest of the colonists would be going down on later
Rights.

Before we left the station, we were all handed a bundle of leaflets
full of instructions, warnings and advice about conditions on earth.  I
felt that it was hardly necessary for me to read through all this, but
was quite glad to have another souvenir of my visit.  It was certainly
a good idea giving these leaflets out at this stage in the homeward
journey, because it kept most of the passengers so busy reading thdt
they didn't have time to worry about anything else until we'd landed.

The air lock was only large enough to hold about a dozen people at a
time, so it took quite a while to shepherd us all through.  As each
batch left the station, the lock had to be set revolving to counteract
its normal spin, then it had to be coupled to the waiting spaceship,
uncoupled again when the occupants had gone through, and the whole
sequence restarted.  I wondered what would happen if something jammed
while the spinning station was connected to the stationary ship.
Probably the ship would come off worse-that is, next to the unfortunate
people in the air lockl However, I discovered later there was an
additional movable coupling to take care of just such an emergency.

The earth ferry was the biggest spaceship I had ever been inside. There
was one large cabin for the passengers, with rows of seats in which we
were supposed to remain strapped during the trip.  Since I was lucky
enough to be one of the first to go aboard, I was able to get a seat
near a window.  Most of the passengers had nothing to look at but each
other and the handful of leaflets they'd been given to read.

We waited for nearly an hour before everyone was aboard and the luggage
had been stowed away.  Then the loud-speakers told us to stand by for
take-off in five minutes.  The ship had now been completely -uncoupled
from the station and had drifted several hundred feet away from it.

I had always thought that the return to earth would be rather an
anticlimax after the excitement of a take-off.  There was a different
sort of feeling, it was true, but it was still quite an experience.
Until now, we had been, if not beyond the power of gravity, at least
traveling so swiftly in our orbit that earth could never pull us down.
But now we were going to throw away the speed that gave us safety.  We
would descend until we had re-entered the atmosphere and were forced to
spiral back to the surface.  If we came in too steeply, our ship might
blaze across the sky like a meteor and come to the same fiery end.

I looked at the tense faces around me.  Perhaps the Martian colonists
were thinking the same thoughts.  Perhaps they were wondering what they
were going to meet and do down on the planet which so few of them had
ever before seen.  I hoped that none of them would be disappointed.

Three sharp notes from the loud-speaker gave us the last warning.  Five
seconds later the motors opened up gently, quickly increasing power to
full thrust.  I saw the Residential Station fall swiftly astern, its
great, spi i g drum dwindling against the stars.  Then, with a lump in
my throat, I watched the untidy maze of girders and pressure chambers
that housed so many of my friends go swimming by.  Useless, though the
gesture was, I couldn't help giving them a wave.  After all, they' knew
I was aboard this ship and might catch a glimpse of me through the
window.

Now the two components of the Inner Station were receding rapidly
behind us and soon had passed out of sight under the great wing of the
ferry.  It was hard to realize that in reality we were losing speed
while the station continued on its unvarying way.  And as we lost
speed, so we would start falling down to earth on a long curve that
would take us to the other side of the planet before we entered the
atmosphere.

After a surprisingly short period, the motors cut out again.  We had
shed all the speed that was necessary, and gravity would do the rest.
Most of the passengers had settled down to read, but I decided to have
my last look at the stars, undimmed by atmosphere.  This was also my
last chance of experienciqg weightlessness, but it was wasted because I
couldn't leave my seat.  I did try-and got shooed back by the
steward.

The ship was now pointing agginst the direction of its orbital motion
and had to be swung round so that it entered the atmosphere nose first.
There was plenty of time to carry out this maneuver, and the pilot did
it in a leisurely fashion with the low-powered steering jets at the
wing-tips.  From where I was sitting Lcould see the short columns of
mist stabbing from the nozzles, and very slowly the stars swung around
us.  It was a full ten minutes before we came to rest again, with the
nose of the ship now pointing due cast.

We were still almost five hundred miles above the Equator, moving at
nearly eighteen thousand miles an hour.  But we were now slowly
dropping earthward.  In thirty minutes we would make our first contact
with the atmosphere.

John was sitting next to me, and so I had a chance of airing my
knowledge of geography.

"That's the Pacific Ocean down there,- I said.  And soniothing prompted
me to add, not very tactfully, "You could drop Mars in it without going
near either of the coast lines.99

However, John was too fascinated by the great expanse of water to take
any offense.  It must have been an over

Whelming sight for anyone who had lived on sea less Mars.

There are not even any permanent lakes on that planet, only a few
shallow pools that form around the melting ice caps in the summer.  And
now John was looking down upon water that stretched as far as he could
see in every direction, with a few specks of land dotted upon it here
and there.  I

"Look," I said, "there, straight ahead!  You can see the coast line of
South

America.  We can1 be more than two hundred miles up now."

Still in utter silence, the ship dropped earthward' and the ocean
rolled back beneath us.  No one was reading now if he had a chance of
seeing from one of the windows.  I felt very sorry-for the passengers
in the middle of the cabin who weren't able to watch the approaching
landscape be.  neath.

The coast of South America flashed by in seconds, and ahead lay the
great jungles of the Amazon.  Here was life on a scale that Mars could
not match, not even, perhaps, in the days of its youth.  Thousands of
square Miles of crowded forests, countless streams and rivers were
unfolding beneath us, so swiftly that as soon as one feature had been
grasped, it was already out of sight.

Now the great river was widening as we shot above its course.  We were
approaching the Atlantic, which should have been visible by this time,
but which seemed to be hidden by mists.  As we passed above the mouth
of the

Amazon, I saw that a great storm was raging below.  From time to time
brilliant Hashes of lightning played across the clouds.  It was uncanny
to see all this happening in utter' silence as we raced high
overhead.

A tropical storm," I said to John.  "Do you ever have anything like
that on

Mars?"

I "Not with rain, of course," he said.  "But sometimes we get pretty
bad sandstorms over the deserts.  And I've seen lightning once or
perhaps twice."

"What, without rain clouds?"  I asked.

"Oh, yes, the sand gets electrified.  Not very often, but it does
happen."

The storm was no far behind us, and the Atlantic lay smooth in the
evening sun- We would not see it much longer, however, for darkness lay
ahead.  We were nearing the night side of the planet, and on the
horizon I could see a band of shadow swiffly approaching as we hurtled
into twilight There was something terrifying about plunging headlong
into that curtain of darkness.

In mid-Atlantic we lost the sun, and at almost the same moment we heard
the first whisper of air along the hull.

It was an eerie sound, and it made the hair rise at the back of my
necL

After the silence of space any noise seemed wrong.  But it grew
steadily as the minutes passed, from a faint, distant wail to a
high-pitched -scream.

We were still more than fifty miles up, but at the speed we were
traveling even the incredibly thin atmosphere of these heights was
protesting as we tore through it.

More than that, it was tearing at the ship, slowing it down.  There was
a faint but steadily increasing tag from our straps; the deceleration
was trying to force us out of our seats.  It was like sitting in a car
when the brakes are being slowly applied.  But in this case, the
braking was going to last for two hours, and we would go once more
round the world before we slowed to a halt

We were no longer in a spaceship but an airplane.  In almost complete
darkness-there was no moon-we passed above Africa and the Indian Ocean.
The fact that we were speeding through the night, traveling above the
invisible earth at many thousands of miles an hour,.  made it all the
more impressive.  The thin shriek of the upper atmosphere had become a
steady background to our flight; it grew neither louder nor fainter as
the minutes passed.

I was looking out into the darkness when I saw a faint red glow beneath
me.

At tiM because there was no sense of perspective or distance, it seemed
at an immense depth below the ship, and I could not imagine what it
might be.

A great forest fire, perhaps-but we were now, surely, over the ocean
again.

Then I realized, with a shock that nearly jolted me out of my seat,
that this ominous red glow came from our wing.  The heat of our passage
through the atmosphere was turning it cherry-red.

I stared at that disturbing sight for several seconds before I decided
that everything was really quite in order.  All our tremendous energy
of motion was being converted into heat, though I had never realized
just how much heat would be produced.  For the glow was increasing even
as I watched.  When

I flattened my face against the window, I could see part of the leading
edge, and it was a bright yellow in places.  I wondered if the other
passengers had noticed it, or perhaps the little leaflets, which I
hadn't bothered to read, had already told them not to worry.

I was glad when we emerged into daylight once more, greeting the dawn
above the Pacific.  The glow from the wings was no longer visible and
so ceased to worry me.  Besides, the sheer splendor ~i the sunrise,
which we were approaching at nearly ten thousand miles an hour, took
away all other sensations.  From the Inner Station, I had watched many
dawns and sunsets pass across the earth.  But up there I had been
detached, not part of the scene it selL Now I was once more inside the
atmosphere and these wonderful colors were all around me.  ~ We had now
made one complete circuit of the earth and had shed more than half our
speed.  It was much longer, this time, before the Brazilian jungles
came into view, and they passed more slowly now.  Above the mouth of
the

Amazon the storm was still raging, only a little way beneath us, as we
started out on our last crossing of the South Atlantic.

Then night came once more, and there again was the wing glowing redly
in the darkness around the ship.  It seemed even hotter now, but
perhaps I had grown used to it, for the sight no longer worried me.  We
were nearly home, on the last lap of the journey.  By now we must have
lost so much speed that we were probably traveling no faster than many
normal aircraft.

A cluster of lights along the coast of East Africa told us that we were
heading out over the Indian Ocean again.  I wished I could be up in the
control cabin, watching the preparations for the final approach to the
spaceporL By now the pilot would have picked up the guiding radio
beacons and would be coming down the beam, still -at a great speed but
according to a carefully prearranged program.  When we reached New
Guinea, our velocity would be almost completely spent.  Our ship would
be nothing more than a great glider, flying through the night sky on
the last dregs of its momentum.

The loud-speaker broke into my thoughts.

"Pilot to passengers.  We shall be landing in twenty it minutes.

Even without this warning, I could tell that the flight was nearing its
end.  The scream of the wind outside our hull had dropped in pitch, and
there had been a perceptible change of direction as the ship slanted
downward.  And, most striking sign of all, the red glow outside the
window was rapidly fading.  Presently there were only a few dull
patches left, near the leading edge of the wing.  A few minutes later,
even these had gone.

It was still night as we passed over Sumatra and Borneo.  From time to
time the lights of ships and cities winked into view and went as
term-very slowly now, it seemed, after the headlong.  rush of our first
circuit.  At frequent intervals the loud-speaker called out our speed
and position.  We were traveling at less than a thousand miles an hour
when we passed over the deeper darkness that was the New Guinea coast
line.

"There it is!"  I whispered to John.  The ship had banked slightly, and
beneath the wing was a great constellation of lights.  A signal Bare
rose up in a slow, graceful arc and exploded into crimson fire.  In the
momentary glare, I caught a glimpse of the white mountain peaks
surrounding the spaceport, and I wondered just how much margin of
height we had.  It would be very ironic to meet with disaster in the
last few miles after traveling all this distance.

I never knew the actual moment when we touched down, the landing was so
perfect.  At one instant we were still airborne, at the next the lights
of the runway were.  rolling past as the ship slowly came to rest.  I
sat quite still in my seat, tying to realize that I was back on earth
again.  Then I looked at John.  Judging from his expression, he.  could
hardly believe it either.

The steward came around to help people release their seat straps and
give last-minute advice.  As I looked at the slightly harassed
visitors, I could not help a mild feeling of superiority.  I knew my
way about on earth, but all this must be very strange to them.  They
must be realizing, also, that they were now in the full grip of earth's
gravity, and there was nothing they could do about it until they were
out in space again.

As we had been the first to enter the ship, we were the last to leave
it.  I helped John with some of his personal luggage, as he was
obviously not very happy and wanted at least one hand free to grab any
convenient support

"Cheer up!"  I said.  "You'll soon be jumping around just as much as
you did on Marsl"

"I hope you're right," he answered gloomily.  "At the moment I feel
like a cripple who's lost his crutch."

Mr.  and Mrs.  Moore, I noticed, had expressions of determination on
their faces as they walked cautiously to the air lock.  But if they
wished they were back on Mars, they kept their feelings to themselves.
So did the girls, who for some reason seemed less worried by gravity
than any of us.  We emerged under the shadow of the great wing, the
thin mountain air blowing against our faces.  It was quite warm,
surprisingly so, in fact, for night at such a high altitude, Then I
realized that the wing above us was still hot probably too hot to
touch, even though it was no longer visibly glowing.

We moved slowly away from the ship toward the waiting transport
vehicles.

Before I stepped into the bus that would "take us across to the Port
buildings.  I looked up once more at the starlit sky that had been my
home for a little while, and which, I was resolved, would be my home
again.  Up there in the shadow of the earth, speeding the traffic that
moved from world to world, were Commander Doyle, Tim Benton,

Ronnie Jordan, Norman Powell, and all the other friends I'd made onmy
visit to the Inner Station.  I remembered Commander Doyle's promise,
and wondered how soon I would remind him of it.... John Moore was
waiting patiently behind me, clutching the door handle of the bus.  He
saw me looking up into the sky and followed my gaze.

"You'won't be able to see the station," I said.  "Ifs in eclipse.22

John didn't answer, and then I saw that he was staring into the east,
where the first hint of dawn glowed along the horizon.  High against
these unfamiliar southern stars was something that I did recognize, a
brilliant, ruby beacon, the brightest object in the sky.

"My home," said John, in a faint, sad voice.

I stared into that beckoning light and remembered the pictures John had
shown me and the stories he had told.  Up there were the great colored
deserts, the old sea-beds that man was bringing once more to life, the
little Martians who might, or might not, belong to a race that was more
ancient than ours.

And I knew that, after all, I was going to disappoint Commander Doyle.
The space stations were too near home to satisfy me now.  My
imagination had been captured by that little red world glowing bravely
against the stars.

When I went into space again, the Inner Station would only be the first
milestone on my outward road from earth.

