_He was afraid--not of the present or the future,
but of the past. He was afraid of the thing
tagged Reed Kieran, that stiff blind voiceless
thing wheeling its slow orbit around the Moon,
companion to dead worlds and silent space._
[Illustration]
1.
Something tiny went wrong, but no one ever knew whether it was in an
electric relay or in the brain of the pilot.
The pilot was Lieutenant Charles Wandek, UNRC, home address: 1677
Anstey Avenue, Detroit. He did not survive the crash of his ferry into
Wheel Five. Neither did his three passengers, a young French
astrophysicist, an East Indian expert on magnetic fields, and a
forty-year-old man from Philadelphia who was coming out to replace a
pump technician.
Someone else who did not survive was Reed Kieran, the only man in Wheel
Five itself to lose his life. Kieran, who was thirty-six years old, was
an accredited scientist-employee of UNRC. Home address: 815 Elm Street,
Midland Springs, Ohio.
Kieran, despite the fact that he was a confirmed bachelor, was in Wheel
Five because of a woman. But the woman who had sent him there was no
beautiful lost love. Her name was Gertrude Lemmiken; she was nineteen
years old and overweight, with a fat, stupid face. She suffered from
head-colds, and sniffed constantly in the Ohio college classroom where
Kieran taught Physics Two.
One March morning, Kieran could bear it no longer. He told himself, "If
she sniffs this morning, I'm through. I'll resign and join the UNRC."
Gertrude sniffed. Six months later, having finished his training for the
United Nations Reconnaissance Corps, Kieran shipped out for a term of
duty in UNRC Space Laboratory Number 5, known more familiarly as Wheel
Five.
Wheel Five circled the Moon. There was an elaborate base on the surface
of the Moon in this year 1981. There were laboratories and observatories
there, too. But it had been found that the alternating fortnights of
boiling heat and near-absolute-zero cold on the lunar surface could play
havoc with the delicate instruments used in certain researches. Hence
Wheel Five had been built and was staffed by research men who were
rotated at regular eight-month intervals.
* * * * *
Kieran loved it, from the first. He thought that that was because of the
sheer beauty of it, the gaunt, silver deaths-head of the Moon forever
turning beneath, the still and solemn glory of the undimmed stars, the
filamentaries stretched across the distant star-clusters like shining
veils, the quietness, the peace.
But Kieran had a certain intellectual honesty, and after a while he
admitted to himself that neither the beauty nor the romance of it was
what made this life so attractive to him. It was the fact that he was
far away from Earth. He did not even have to look at Earth, for nearly
all geophysical research was taken care of by Wheels Two and Three that
circled the mother planet. He was almost completely divorced from all
Earth's problems and people.
Kieran liked people, but had never felt that he understood them. What
seemed important to them, all the drives of ordinary day-to-day
existence, had never seemed very important to him. He had felt that
there must be something wrong with him, something lacking, for it seemed
to him that people everywhere committed the most outlandish follies,
believed in the most incredible things, were swayed by pure
herd-instinct into the most harmful courses of behavior. They could not
all be wrong, he thought, so he must be wrong--and it had worried him.
He had taken partial refuge in pure science, but the study and then the
teaching of astrophysics had not been the refuge that Wheel Five was. He
would be sorry to leave the Wheel when his time was up.
And he was sorry, when the day came. The others of the staff were
already out in the docking lock in the rim, waiting to greet the
replacements from the ferry. Kieran, hating to leave, lagged behind.
Then, realizing it would be churlish not to meet this young Frenchman
who was replacing him, he hurried along the corridor in the big spoke
when he saw the ferry coming in.
He was two-thirds of the way along the spoke to the rim when it
happened. There was a tremendous crash that flung him violently from his
feet. He felt a coldness, instant and terrible.
He was dying.
He was dead.
The ferry had been coming in on a perfectly normal approach when the
tiny something went wrong, in the ship or in the judgment of the pilot.
Its drive-rockets suddenly blasted on full, it heeled over sharply, it
smashed through the big starboard spoke like a knife through butter.
Wheel Five staggered, rocked, and floundered. The automatic safety
bulkheads had all closed, and the big spoke--Section T2--was the only
section to blow its air, and Kieran was the only man caught in it. The
alarms went off, and while the wreckage of the ferry, with three dead
men in it, was still drifting close by, everyone in the Wheel was in his
pressure-suit and emergency measures were in full force.
* * * * *
Within thirty minutes it became evident that the Wheel was going to
survive this accident. It was edging slowly out of orbit from the
impetus of the blow, and in the present weakened state of the
construction its small corrective rockets could not be used to stop the
drift. But Meloni, the UNRC captain commanding, had got first reports
from his damage-control teams, and it did not look too bad. He fired
off peremptory demands for the repair materials he would need, and was
assured by UNRC headquarters at Mexico City that the ferries would be
loaded and on their way as soon as possible.
Meloni was just beginning to relax a little when a young officer brought
up a minor but vexing problem. Lieutenant Vinson had headed the small
party sent out to recover the bodies of the four dead men. In their
pressure-suits they had been pawing through the tangled wreckage for
some time, and young Vinson was tired when he made his report.
"We have all four alongside, sir. The three men in the ferry were pretty
badly mangled in the crash. Kieran wasn't physically wounded, but died
from space-asphyxiation."
The captain stared at him. "Alongside? Why didn't you bring them in?
They'll go back in one of the ferries to Earth for burial."
"But--" Vinson started to protest.
Meloni interrupted sharply. "You need to learn a few things about
morale, Lieutenant. You think it's going to do morale here any good to
have four dead men floating alongside where everyone can see them? Fetch
them in and store them in one of the holds."
Vinson, sweating and unhappy now, had visions of a black mark on his
record, and determined to make his point.
"But about Kieran, sir--he was only frozen. Suppose there was a chance
to bring him back?"
"Bring him back? What the devil are you talking about?"
Vinson said, "I read they're trying to find some way of restoring a man
that gets space-frozen. Some scientists down at Delhi University. If
they succeeded, and if we had Kieran still intact in space--"
"Oh, hell, that's just a scientific pipe-dream, they'll never find a way
to do that," Meloni said. "It's all just theory."
"Yes, sir," said Vinson, hanging his head.
"We've got trouble enough here without you bringing up ideas like this,"
the captain continued angrily. "Get out of here."