people forgot him. If his name was mentioned, someone might say
vaguely: "McCauley ... McCauley? It seems to me I've heard the
name." This was because remarkable events don't stay remarkable as
time goes past. There was a two-hundred-pound satellite circling
the moon these days, industriously sending back not only pictures
of the moon's far side, but pictures of cloud masses on Earth which
told much more about Earth's weather than had been known before. A
drone missile had gone out to Mars, and its instruments suggested
that men had better not come out just yet, and other drones had
gone past Venus and said definitely that men better not come out
just yet. So something had to be done to make those journeys
possible. Men had to work in space, testing this and trying that,
staying days or weeks at a time when solar flare-particles were not
too much in evidence. This meant that there had to be a place for
them to live and work. There were plenty of men who'd done
spectacular things lately, but this needed somebody who would be
worrying not about fame, but about getting a job done right. So
Major McCauley received certain orders.)
On as much of the Space Platform as existed so far, a working day
lasted an hour and forty minutes. There wasn't much of the Platform, as
yet. The greatest bulk was a squat, clumsy metal object which had come
up from Earth, pouring out rocket flames, to be the Platform's nucleus.
From it now sprouted spidery, flimsy metal girders which reached out
in apparent aimlessness. They formed an incomplete skeleton of joined
triangles whose final form seemed indefinite. But in time they would
form a most unlikely icosahedron traced in threads of silvery metal in
emptiness. Although the Platform was barely begun, it grew noticeably
as time went by, even though the working day was so brief.
Some people would have challenged the word "day." There was no true
night where the first part of the Platform floated hurriedly in orbit
some three thousand miles out from the planet Earth. There was light
when the sun shone on it, which was two hours and five minutes out of
three hours and seven. Despite Luna, Earth's ancient and untidy moon,
there was abysmal darkness when the Platform plunged into Earth's
shadow. This was not nightfall. When sunlight ended, cut off by Earth's
eight-thousand-mile bulk of stone and metal, the phenomenon was an
eclipse. Once in each revolution about the world which was building it,
the Platform was eclipsed by Earth. When light returned, it was not
sunrise, it was the ending of an eclipse.
McCauley was in charge of the Platform's construction crew, which
consisted of himself--a major--and Randy Hall--a captain--and Sammy
Breen, a second lieutenant in the Space Service. They lived after a
fashion in the cabin of the ship that had brought them and a lot of
building material up and out to the orbit the Platform was to follow.
When a work period ended, they made their way painfully to that cabin.
They made sure that they were inside it before the sun touched the
outer limits of Earth's atmosphere and turned orange and deep-red and
then disappeared, all within ten seconds. It was necessary, for in
Earth's shadow the gossamer-like framework lost heat rapidly. Long
before the end of the eclipse, the temperature of the bare metal
dropped incredibly. Even with Earth nearby to temper it, it fell to
something like two hundred and twenty-odd degrees below zero.
So between work periods there was darkness and unthinkable cold,
and half the universe was brilliant stars--sometimes the moon was
visible--and the other half looked like a hole in emptiness leading to
nowhere. Actually, the seeming abyss was the night side of Earth, and
sometimes Randy or young Lieutenant Breen used the telescope and found
infinitesimal twinklings on it which could be calculated to be London,
or New York, or Paris, or some other metropolis. But the night lights
of cities on Earth were not remarkably bright, from three thousand
miles out in the planet's shadow. Often, too, there were clouds thick
enough to mask any man-made illumination. There was not much to see
from the Platform in darkness and at an early stage of its construction.
But after the darkness there came light.
It was not dawn, of course. It began as a reddish-pinkish line which
precisely outlined a half circle and formed a visible boundary between
absolute blackness and the firmament of stars. The line thickened
at its ends and then at its center. Instantly thereafter the sun
peered--deep-red--around the edge of the planet Earth. It was a
very lively sun. In seconds it reversed the color changes of its
disappearance, fading from ruby to gold and then to the furnace-flame
color it shows out of the atmosphere. And the crescent of lighted Earth
grew broader and broader and suddenly seas and continents and oceans
and islands seemed to come pouring out to cover the darkness, like
creation happening as a flood.
Then, while the partially built Platform swept onward, without sound
or sensation of movement, nothing else happened for a certain time.
The three men inside the cabin waited for the metal to warm up from
the temperature of liquid air. During full sunshine it went up to the
temperature of low-pressure steam. When all the framework was warm
enough so it was no longer brittle, the cabin air lock opened. McCauley
came out in a silvery space suit. Captain Randy Hall followed him.
Lieutenant Sammy Breen came last. McCauley surveyed the framework. Even
a tiny meteorite could do damage, because any such object could be
expected to hit at a velocity of seven to forty miles per second.
But when his inspection was over, McCauley slung a space rope around
a girder, straddled the metal beam, and pulled himself effortlessly
along to its first triangular junction with the other frame members.
He had no weight. Nothing had any weight. One could not fall from the
Platform, but one could very easily become lost from it. McCauley had
acquired a certain fanatical concern about precautions against loss of
contact with the only object within some three thousand miles which
would let a man go on living.
When he reached the first junction of frame members, McCauley unlooped
his space rope from behind the junction, looped it again beyond the
joining place, and crawled over to straddle the next girder and slide
along it with equal absence of effort until he arrived at the place
where he'd left off work a little over an hour before. Randy Hall and
Sammy Breen, meanwhile, emulated him, going in other directions. Within
five minutes of coming out of the air lock they were perched at three
separate places on the absurd framework.
With quite inadequate-looking cords they drew large metal beams
toward them from their place beside the cabin. McCauley, for example,
pulled at a thirty-foot girder with a piece of string. It stirred and
shifted and floated to him. He stopped it, his knees holding him fast.
Then--very clumsily because of its mass--he maneuvered it into place,
slipped bolts through the ready-drilled holes, and tightened up the
nuts. He finished his first girder. Randy completed his. Sammy Breen
got his section in place, and then stopped.
"Major, sir," said his voice via space phone in McCauley's helmet
phones, "there's something wrong here. A bolt doesn't go all the way
through its hole. It won't force. The hole needs to be reamed out."
It was a trivial but annoying happening. The parts for the Space
Platform had been cut out, shaped, and drilled on Earth. In theory they
should fit perfectly together in space. But somebody had scamped on an
inspection job and the result of his carelessness had to be repaired.
It had to be done in a nondescript, crazy framework that was hurtling
along in orbit at something over eleven thousand five hundred miles an
hour. It shouldn't have happened.
"Memorize the part number for report," said McCauley, "and get the
reamer and clear it."
"Yes, sir," said Breen.
McCauley pulled gently at a cord and a second girder stirred and
floated gently toward him.
Below, the sunlit surface of Earth had an extraordinary appearance. It
was some sixty-five degrees in diameter. At its edges the shapes of
land and water--the planetary markings--were foreshortened and crowded
together in an unparalleled fashion. A twelve-inch globe looked at
from five inches away will give something of the same effect. From one
side of the disk the markings moved toward the center, thickening and
taking recognizable form as they neared the middle. Then they went on,
distorted in a different fashion as they approached the opposite edge.
When McCauley set his second beam in place a wildly twisted Isthmus of
Panama appeared out of the misty whiteness which bordered Earth from
where he floated. In half an hour it would be directly underneath and
plainly recognizable. In another half hour it would be a new shape
entirely. Then it would vanish. Only the center of the visible disk
resembled any map-maker's representation, and that spot changed and
changed and changed as the Space Platform hurtled past. At any given
moment McCauley could see a ninth of all the planet's surface, but only
a fraction of what he saw was familiar, and that changed continuously.
Sammy Breen slid along the Platform's frame to the cabin, the ship
which had risen to this place from Earth, but would never return to
Earth again. Arrived at the cabin, he seized a handrail, loosened his
space rope, and pulled himself to the air lock. Immediately, of course,
air would flow into the lock and he could emerge into the cabin's
interior. He'd get the tool he needed for a job that should have been
done on Earth. Then he'd come out again.
Randy tapped on the girder he'd just bolted into place. The vibrations
passed through the metal and through McCauley's space suit to the air
within it.
"I just happened to think," said Randy cheerfully, "that people down
on Earth are all excited about this thing we're building. They think
it's wonderful. And so it is, at the present moment. But I'm thinking
that in a little while it won't be wonderful. It'll be old stuff. And
the day'll come when it's a nuisance. There'll be complaints that it's
in the way, barging around through space. It'll be in the way of ships
taking tourists on week-end trips to Mars. They'll say it's a danger
to astrogation. They'll say it should be cleared out of space. They'll
insist that it be junked."
McCauley grunted. Randy was probably right. But just now McCauley
held himself to a three-by-five-inch hollow metal beam, with a million
million stars shining in all possible colors at the same time as the
sun. He continued to work on, building the Platform that some day would
be considered a nuisance. Three thousand miles away, geographical
features squirmed and twisted themselves in their progress across the
disk of Earth.
"But there'll come a time," said Randy cheerfully, "when one of my
twenty-five-times-removed great-grand-sons will be spanked by his
mother. He'll howl. It will be a very commonplace sort of happening.
The only thing odd about it will be that it won't happen down on old
Earth below us. It'll happen off somewhere on a planet that nobody's
dreamed of yet, circling a sun that nobody's bothered to name, off
yonder somewhere in the Milky Way."
McCauley grunted again.
"You haven't any kids yet, let alone great-great-grand-kids. You're not
even married. Why the sentiment?"
Randy's voice came clearly in the helmet phones.
"I've been trying to think of a reason for me to be here," he
explained, "playing with an oversized Erector set, instead of chasing
some girl down on Earth. And I realized that this Platform, which
will eventually be junked, has to be built before we can hope to
colonize the nearer planets, let alone the stars. So now I know why
I'm here. I'm doing this so my many-times-removed great-grandchildren
can get their spankings all over the galaxy instead of only on the
insignificant earth below. That's a noble purpose! I feel better."
"Good!" said McCauley, with irony.
He felt metallic clankings through the girder on which he was working.
He turned his head within the space helmet. Sammy Breen had come out
of the air lock, guiding himself by a handrail to a position astride a
beam. He slid swiftly along its length. He came to a junction, flipped
his space rope around to the far side of the joining place, swung over,
and slid to the next junction like someone coasting down a stair rail.
He was a cheerful young man, Sammy Breen.
"Sammy," said McCauley, "hold everything. I'll be over."
When people encounter each other only occasionally, there is no
particular need for them to think intensively about each other's
feelings. But three people isolated in an enforced intimacy much closer
than that of cellmates have to take thought. When one of them is
responsible for the other two, tact has to be practiced painstakingly.
When one of the three is a young man who doesn't believe that anything
can happen to him because nothing ever has, the situation calls for
extreme care. McCauley had to use his brains if Randy and Sammy Breen
were to be able to work with him under exacting conditions like these.
He unhooked his space rope, rehooked it past a junction, and pulled
himself toward the place where Sammy Breen had come to a stop. It was,
of course, at a place where two of the frame pieces of the Platform
should join a third. They were to be bolted together and then another
long section of framework would be added, which in turn would have
yet another beam placed and bolted to it so the construction could
continue. At the moment, however, a bolt hole needed to be reamed so
the parts could be bolted together.
McCauley arrived at the corner of a triangle. When linked to all the
others, this triangle would ultimately support the skin and hold the
interior partitions of the Platform. Again he slipped his space rope
over the junction, hooked it, followed it, and went on toward the place
where Sammy Breen was. Sammy's voice came out of his helmet phones.
"I saw a man do this once in a circus," said Sammy. "I thought he was
wonderful. But I can do it!"
McCauley looked up. Sammy Breen had his space rope hooked around the
girder, to be sure. But now he floated, head toward Earth, with one
finger barely touching the metal beam. A photograph would have shown
him apparently supporting his whole weight on a single finger. But here
there was no weight. Nothing drew Sammy toward either Earth or the
Platform. But for his space rope, the lightest thrust of his finger
would have sent him floating slowly, implacably, helplessly away from
the spidery floating object, to drift alone through space forever.
"I hope you checked your rope before you came outside," McCauley said
dryly.
"I did," said Sammy nonchalantly. "It's okay."
He tried to pull himself back to the girder with his fingers. He
couldn't quite reach it. He was no more than half an inch from a
fingertip hold that would have been more than enough, but he couldn't
make it. He reached and reached, and his movements made his body in
its space suit revolve ridiculously upside down and otherwise. Then he
couldn't get his hand anywhere near the girder.
McCauley watched. He was unreasonably tense. But Sammy rather
sheepishly gave a tug on his space rope and floated back to firm
contact with the Platform.
"Not to be finicky about it," said McCauley, "that wasn't wise. There
was only one chance in ten thousand that anything could happen, but
there was no need to take it."
"Yes, sir," said Sammy Breen.
McCauley settled down, three feet from the end of the beam that was to
be bolted to the one that needed reaming. Sammy Breen gripped that beam
between his thighs and hauled the reamer to his hand. At work on the
Platform, in emptiness, a man did not carry things, he towed them on
cords. If he let go of any untethered object it might stay where he put
it, in mid-space, but it was much more likely to have some small motion
relative to his which would make it drift placidly out of reach forever.
Sammy Breen set the reamer in place in the bolt hole and pulled its
trigger. It cut metal. But it dragged unreasonably at him, trying to
turn him in the direction opposite its own rotation. Tiny chips and
metal dust twinkled in the fierce sunshine. They floated away. They
would never fall to Earth. Never. The reamer went through and Sammy cut
off its power. He tried to pull it out. It stuck.
McCauley watched. He'd made a rule that nobody should do anything in
the least out of routine without another man nearby. The three of
them did not work together at one spot ordinarily. In the kind of
conditions customary here, they'd be hopelessly in each other's way.
But he'd issued the order requiring two to be together on any unusual
job. Now, having obeyed his own rule that there must be a second man
at hand when anything beyond simple bolting was to be done, tact made
him keep silent while Sammy did it his own way. Too-close supervision
and too-constant instruction can make for inefficiency. Worse, on a
job like building the Platform, they can make for friction. McCauley
watched without comment. He'd have done this thing differently. But it
would be unwise to insist that it be done his way.
Sammy jerked at the reamer, which meant that he also jerked himself at
it. He slid along the girder he gripped. McCauley said nothing. He'd
criticized Sammy's horse-play a moment earlier. He did not want to make
a second criticism now.
Sammy reached out--it would not be true to say that he stood up--and
put his foot beside the reamer in the bolt hole. The position gave him
leverage. He pulled violently. It was a wholly reasonable, completely
natural, thoroughly matter-of-fact action. A man pulling something
stuck in a hole braces himself exactly that way to get a strong pull at
it. But this was on the Space Platform, where there is no weight.
The reamer gave. It came out abruptly. Sammy Breen shot away from the
beam to the full length of his space rope--and the space rope slid off
the end of the beam. He was headed for infinity with the reamer in his
hand.
McCauley grabbed. He never knew how he managed to make so swift a
motion in his clumsy space suit. But he hurled his body forward and
snatched at the same instant. He caught the rope. But to reach it he'd
had to lose his own leg-grip on the beam. The impetus of Sammy's leap
jerked savagely at him. He squeezed his legs together in a frantic
effort to hold fast by friction. He tried to turn his toes in to catch
hold before he slid completely clear. But the feet of space suits do
not pivot laterally so he could not turn them inward. Holding fast to
Sammy's space rope, he was jerked inexorably clear and he and Sammy
Breen floated away to emptiness together.
It was neither a rapid motion nor a simple one. The jerk had come at an
angle rather than straight out. The two of them revolved slowly around
each other at the two ends of the rope. McCauley held on grimly, braced
for the countervailing tug of his own rope when it tightened.
It did tighten. And then it slid. The spot where Sammy had meant to
bolt two girders together was, naturally, the point where the two
frame members would complete a new triangle. It was to form one of
the triangular facets of the twenty-sided figure the Platform would
constitute when completed. But....
McCauley's rope slid, and caught, and slid again. Then it came free.
Before it came free it had slowed the two of them, to be sure. It
increased the rate of their spin. But it slid off to emptiness and the
two of them went away from the Platform, revolving fairly rapidly about
each other, held together by Sammy's space rope.
Their speed around each other was greater than the speed at which, as a
pair, they were drifting serenely away. At one point in each rotation
one of them approached the Platform while the other moved away from
it. A second later the other spun toward the Platform and the first
one moved toward emptiness. But together they drifted very, very
deliberately toward the stars.
McCauley swore. Then he said curtly:
"Lieutenant!" The use of the term instead of the name was wise.
Sammy Breen might be a horrified young man. But Lieutenant Breen was
something else.
"Sir," said his voice unsteadily in McCauley's headphones, "I'm sorry,
sir. I should have...."
"I'm going to throw you my space rope," snapped McCauley. "You will
catch it and obey my orders."
"Yes, sir."
"Catch!" snapped McCauley.
He threw the rope. Because they were rotating, the first cast was wild.
Sammy Breen wasn't where he threw the rope when it got to him. It had
McCauley's own speed of rotation, so it did not go where he aimed. It
took half a dozen attempts to get the rope to where the younger man
could catch the squirming line in the stiff gauntlet of his space suit.
"Now, fasten your reamer to the rope," commanded McCauley. "Tie on your
other tools. Give me every bit of equipment you've got except your air
tanks."
"Y-yes, sir," said Sammy's voice in the helmet phones.
Spinning as they were, the universe of stars and sun and the vast,
unfamiliar, brilliantly lighted object which was Earth seemed to be
engaged in a monstrous saraband. Now Sammy was a glaringly bright
object with full, blazing sunshine hitting his space suit. Again he
was lighted from the side with the brightness of Earth behind him,
racing past his body with all its features blurred. Yet again the stars
seemed not points of light but streaks, and there were moments when the
sun itself was a flashing band of intolerable brightness. But somehow
this vast and silent motion of the cosmos seemed unreal. It was like a
hallucination. It was like a nightmare in which absolutely nothing was
true; in which there was no actual sun or Earth or stars, because in
reality those things did not swing in lunatic sweeps around anybody,
anywhere.
While the younger man blindly obeyed McCauley, they continued to drift
away toward infinity. Curiously enough, the centrifugal force caused by
their spinning gave McCauley the only sensation of weight that he'd had
since his arrival at the orbit of the Platform.
Randy's voice came in McCauley's headphones.
"Ed! My God!"
His tone was anguished and hopeless.
"Randy," said McCauley in clipped tones. "You can be useful. When we're
in line with you, say 'tip.' Say it again. Keep it up."
Almost instantly Randy said, "Tip." Then, "Tip." Then, "Tip" again.
Sammy Breen said hoarsely:
"All my equipment, sir, is fastened to your space rope. Everything but
my air tanks."
"Right. Now let go of it," commanded McCauley. "Randy, how fast are we
drifting away?"
Randy's voice came hoarse and harsh.
"I don't know. Slowly, but you're a good hundred and fifty feet off. A
trifle more."
McCauley calculated aloud, for his own comfort as well as the
information of Randy and Sammy Breen.
"We've been drifting maybe half a minute. Those 'tips' of yours were
about one second apart. We're spinning once in two seconds at the ends
of a thirty-foot rope. Each of us has an angular velocity of something
over forty feet per second. Forty-five or better. Our joint speed away
from the Platform--a hundred and fifty feet in thirty seconds....
Somewhere around five feet per second. Not much more, anyhow! We're
practically crawling away, but we're spinning like blazes."
Randy said, dry-throated:
"Even if we had rope, Ed, I couldn't get it to you."
"I know," said McCauley curtly. "Lieutenant?"
"Yes, sir," said Sammy Breen's voice, quite steady now. "I've thought
of something, sir. If we act fast and I cut the rope at just the right
instant, sir...."
"Keep quiet!" snapped McCauley. "That's an order! Right now I want you
to push that equipment at the end of my rope away from you as hard
as you can, in the direction we're spinning. The way we're spinning!
You've got too much angular velocity. Understand?"
"Yes, sir," said Sammy. "I'm glad, sir...."
"Keep quiet!" snapped McCauley again. "Push!"