"No," said Sanford, grinning. "Obviously the radar down on
Earth--shipboard ones on this hemisphere, of course--have reported that
the Platform still exists. But we haven't communicated since the bombs
went off. They probably think we had so many punctures that we lost all
our air and are all wiped out. They'll be glad to hear from you that we
aren't."
Joe threw a switch, frowning. This wasn't right. Sanford was the senior
scientist on board and hence in command, because he was best-qualified
to direct the scientific observations the Platform was making. But there
was something specifically wrong.
The communicator hummed. A faint voice sounded. It swelled to loudness.
"Calling Space Platform! _Calling Space Platform!_ CALLING SPACE
PLATFORM!" Joe turned down the volume. He said into the microphone:
"Space Platform calling Earth. Joe Kenmore reporting. We have made
contact with the Platform and completed our landing. Our cargo is now
being unloaded. Our landing rockets had to be expended against
presumably hostile bombs, and we are now unable to return to Earth. The
ship and the Platform, however, are unharmed. I am now waiting for
orders. Report ends."
He turned away from the microphone. Sanford said sharply, "Go on! Tell
them what a hero you are!"
"I'm going to help unload my ship," Joe said shortly. "You report what
you please."
"Get back at that transmitter!" shouted Sanford furiously. "Tell 'em
you're a hero! Tell 'em you're wonderful! I'll tell 'em how useless it
is!"
Joe saw the other man in the room, the man at the radar screens, shake
his head. He got up and fumbled his way along the wall to the door.
Sanford shouted after him angrily.
Joe went out, found the four-foot tunnel, and floated not down but along
it back to the unloading lock. Wordlessly, he set to work to get the
cargo out of the cargo hold of the spaceship.
Handling objects in weightlessness which on Earth would be heavy was an
art in itself. Two men could move tons. It needed only one man to start
a massive crate in motion. However, one had either to lift or push an
object in the exact line it was to follow. To thrust hard for a short
time produced exactly the same effect as to push gently for a longer
period. Anything floated tranquilly in the line along which it was
moved. The man who had to stop it, though, needed to use exactly as much
energy as the man who sent it floating. He needed to check the floating
thing in exactly the same line. If one tried to stop a massive shipment
from one side, he would topple into it and he and the crate together
would go floundering helplessly over each other.
The Chief had gone off to help maneuver two-ton guided missiles into
launching tubes. One crew member remained with Haney, unloading things
that would have had to be handled with cranes on Earth. Joe found
himself needed most in the storage chamber. A crate floated from the
ship to the crewman. Standing head downward, he stopped its original
movement, braced himself, and sent it floating to Joe. He braced
himself, stopped its flight, and very slowly--to move fast with anything
heavy in his hands would pull his feet from the floor--set it on a stack
of similar objects which would presently be fastened in place.
Everything had to be done in slow motion, or one would lose his footing.
Joe worked painstakingly. He gradually began to understand the process.
But the muscles of his stomach ached because of their continuous,
instinctive cramp due to the sensation of unending fall.
Mike floated through the hatchway from the lock. He twisted about as he
floated, and his magnetized soles clanked to a deft contact with the
wall. He said calmly: "That guy Sanford has cracked up. He's potty. If
this were jail he'd be stir-crazy. He's yelling into the communicator
now that we'll all be dead in a matter of days, and the rocket missiles
we brought up won't help. He's nasty about it, too!"
Haney called from the cargo space of the ship in the lock: "All empty
here! We're unloaded."
There were sounds as he closed the cargo doors. Haney, followed by the
Chief, came into view, floating as Mike had done. But he didn't land as
skillfully. He touched the wall on his hands and knees and bounced away
and tried helplessly to swim to a hand-hold. It would have been funny
except that Joe was in no mood for humor.
Mike whipped off his belt and flipped the end of it to Haney. He caught
it and was drawn gently to the wall. Haney's shoes clicked to a hold.
The Chief landed more expertly.
"We need wings here," he said ruefully. "You reported, Joe?"
Joe nodded. He turned to Brent, the crew member who'd been unloading. He
knew him too, from their two-way video conversations.
"Sanford does act oddly," he said uncomfortably. "When he met me in the
lock he said our coming was useless. He talked about the futility of
everything while I reported. He sounds like he sneers at every possible
action as useless."
"Most likely it is," Brent said mildly. "Here, anyhow. It does look as
if we're going to be knocked off. But Sanford's taking it badly. The
rest of us have let him act as he pleased because it didn't seem to
matter. It probably doesn't, except that he's annoying."
Mike said truculently, "We won't be knocked off! We've got rockets of
our own up here now! We can fight back if there's another attack!"
Brent shrugged. His face was young enough, but deeply lined. He said as
mildly as before: "Your landing rockets set off four bombs on the way
from Earth. You brought us six more rocket missiles. How many bombs can
we knock down with them?"
Joe blinked. It was a shock to realize the facts of life in an
artificial satellite. If it could be reached by bombs from Earth, the
bombs could be reached by guided missiles from the satellite. But it
would take one guided missile to knock down one bomb--with luck.
"I see," said Joe slowly. "We can handle just six more bombs from
Earth."
"Six in the next month," agreed Brent wrily. "It'll be that long before
we get more. Somebody sent up four bombs today. Suppose they send eight
next time? Or simply one a day for a week?"
Mike made an angry noise. "The seventh bomb shot at us knocks us out!
We're sitting ducks here too!"
Brent nodded. He said mildly:
"Yes. The Platform can't be defended against an indefinite number of
bombs from Earth. Of course the United States could go to war because
we've been shot at. But would that do us any good? We'd be shot down in
the war."
Joe said distastefully, "And Sanford's cracked up because he knows he's
going to be killed?"
Brent said earnestly. "Oh, no! He's a good scientist! But he's always
had a brilliant mind. Poor devil, he's never failed at anything in all
his life until now! Now he _has_ failed. He's going to be killed, and he
can't think of any way to stop it. His brains are the only things he's
ever believed in, and now they're no good. He can't accept the idea that
he's stupid, so he has to believe that everything else is. It's a
necessity for him. Haven't you known people who had to think everybody
else was stupid to keep from knowing that they were themselves?"
Joe nodded. He waited.
"Sanford," said Brent earnestly, "simply can't adjust to the discovery
that he's no better than anybody else. That's all. He was a nice guy,
but he's not used to frustration and he can't take it. Therefore he
scorns everything that frustrates him--and everything else, by
necessity. He'll be scornful about getting killed when it happens. But
waiting for it is becoming intolerable to him."
He looked at his watch. He said apologetically, "I'm the crew
psychologist. That's why I speak so firmly. In five minutes we're due to
come out of the Earth's shadow into sunshine again. I'd suggest that you
come to watch. It's good to look at."
He did not wait for an answer. He led the way. And the others followed
in a strange procession. Somehow, automatically, they fell into single
file, and they moved on their magnetic-soled slippers toward a passage
tube in one wall. Their slipper soles clanked and clicked in an erratic
rhythm. Brent walked with the mincing steps necessary for movement in
weightlessness. The others imitated him. Their hands no longer hung
naturally by their sides, but tended to make extravagant gestures with
the slightest muscular impulse. They swayed extraordinarily as they
walked. Brent was a slender figure, and Joe was more thick-set, and
Haney was taller, and lean. The burly Chief and the forty-one inch
figure of Mike the midget followed after them. They made a queer
procession indeed.
Minutes later they were in a blister on the skin of the Platform. There
were quartz glass ports in the sidewall. Outside the glass were metal
shutters. Brent served out dense goggles, almost black, and touched the
buttons that opened the steel port coverings.
They looked into space. The dimmer stars were extinguished by the
goggles they wore. The brighter ones seemed faint and widely spaced.
Beneath their feet as they held to handrails lay the featureless
darkness of Earth. But before them and very far away there was a vast,
dim arch of deepest red.
It was sunlight filtered through the thickest layers of Earth's air. It
barely outlined the curve of that gigantic globe. As they stared, it
grew brighter. The artificial satellite required little more than four
hours for one revolution about its primary, the Earth. To those aboard
it, the Earth would go through all its phases in no longer a time. They
saw now the thinnest possible crescent of the new Earth. But in
minutes--almost in seconds--the deep red sunshine brightened to gold.
The hair-thin line of light widened to a narrow ribbon which described
an eight-thousand-mile half-circle. It brightened markedly at the
middle. It remained red at its ends, but in the very center it glowed
with splendid flame. Then a golden ball appeared, and swam up and
detached itself from the Earth, and the on-lookers saw the breath-taking
spectacle of all of Earth's surface seemingly being born of the night.
As if new-created before their eyes, seas and lands unfolded in the
sunlight. They watched flecks of cloud and the long shadows of
mountains, and the strangely different colorings of its fields and
forests.
As Brent had told them, it was good to watch.
It was half an hour later when they gathered in the kitchen of the
Platform. The man who had been loading launching tubes now briskly
worked to prepare a meal on the extremely unusual cooking-devices of a
human outpost in interplanetary space.
The food smelled good. But Joe noticed that he could smell growing
things. Green stuff. It was absurd--until he remembered that there was a
hydroponic garden here. Plants grew in it under sunlamps which were
turned on for a certain number of hours every day. The plants purified
the Platform's air, and of course provided some fresh and nourishing
food for the crew.
They ate. The food was served in plastic bowls, with elastic thread
covers through which they could see and choose the particular morsels
they fancied next. The threads stretched to let through the forks they
ate with. But Brent used a rather more practical pair of tongs in a
businesslike manner.
They drank coffee from cups which looked very much like ordinary cups on
Earth. Joe remembered suddenly that Sally Holt had had much to do with
the design of domestic science arrangements here. He regarded his cup
with interest. It stayed in its saucer because of magnets in both
plastic articles. The saucer stayed on the table because the table was
magnetic, too. And the coffee did not float out to mid-air in a hot,
round brownish ball, because there was a transparent cover over the cup.
When one put his lips to the proper edge, a part of the cover yielded as
the cup was squeezed. The far side of the cup was flexible. One pressed,
and the coffee came into one's lips without the spilling of a drop.
At that moment Joe really thought of Sally for the first time in a good
two hours. She'd been anxious that living in the Platform should be as
normal and Earth-like as possible. The total absence of weight would be
bad enough. She believed it needed to be countered, as a psychological
factor in staying sane, by the effect of normal-seeming chairs and
normal-tasting food, and not too exotic systems for eating.
Joe asked Brent about it.
"Oh, yes," said Brent mildly. "It's likely we'd all have gone off the
deep end if there weren't some familiar things about. To have to drink
from a cup that one squeezes is tolerable. But we'd have felt hysterical
at times if we had to drink everything from the equivalent of baby
bottles."
"Sally Holt," said Joe, "is a friend of mine. She helped design this
stuff."
"That girl has every ounce of brains that any woman can be trusted
with!" Brent said warmly. "She thought of things that would never have
occurred to me! As a psychologist, I could see how good her ideas were
when she brought them up, but as a male I'd never have dreamed of them."
Then he grinned. "She fell down on just one point. So did everybody
else. Nobody happened to think of a garbage-disposal system for the
Platform."
It came into Joe's mind that garbage-disposal was hardly a subject one
would expect to be discussing in interplanetary space. But the Platform
wasn't the same thing as a spaceship. A ship could jettison refuse and
leave it behind, or store it during a voyage and dump it at either end.
But the Space Platform would never land. It could roll on forever. And
if it heaved out its refuse from airlocks--why--the stuff would still
have the Platform's orbital speed and would follow it tirelessly around
the Earth until the end of time.
"We dry and store it now," said Brent. "If we were going to live, we'd
figure out some way to turn it to fertilizer for the hydroponic gardens.
It's hardly worth while as things are. Even then, though, the problem of
tin cans could be hopeless."
The Chief wiped his mouth deliberately. He had helped load four
guided-missile launching tubes, and he had been brought up to date on
the state of things in the Platform. He growled in a preliminary fashion
and said, "Joe."
Joe looked at him.
"We brought up six two-ton guided missiles," said the Chief dourly.
"We'll have warning of other bombs coming up. We can send these missiles
out to intercept 'em. Six of 'em. They can get close enough to set off
their proximity fuses, anyhow. But what are we going to do, Joe, if
somebody flings seven bombs at us? We can manage six--maybe. But what'll
we do with the one that's left over?"
"Have you any ideas?" asked Joe.
The Chief shook his head. Brent said mildly. "We've worked on that here
in the Platform, I assure you. And as Sanford puts it quite soundly,
about the only thing we can really do is throw our empty tin cans at
them."
Joe nodded. Then he tensed. Brent had meant it as a rather mirthless
joke. But Joe was astonished at what his own brain made of it. He
thought it over. Then he said, "Why not? It ought to be a very good
trick."
Brent stared at him incredulously. Haney looked solemnly at him. The
Chief regarded Joe thoughtfully out of the corner of his eye. Then Mike
shouted gleefully. The Chief blinked, and a moment later grunted
wrathful unintelligible syllables of Mohawk, and then tried to pound Joe
on the back and because of his want of weight went head over heels into
the air between the six walls of the kitchen.
Haney said disgustedly, "Joe, there are times when a guy wants to murder
you! Why didn't I think of that?"
But Brent was looking at the four of them with a lively, helpless
curiosity. "Will you guys let me in on this?"
They told him. Joe began to explain it carefully, but the Chief broke in
with a barked and impatient description, and then Mike interrupted to
snap a correction. But by that time Brent's expression had changed with
astonishing suddenness.
"I see! I see!" he said excitedly. "All right! Have you got space suits
in your ship? We have them. So we'll go out and pelt the stars with
garbage. I think we'd better get at it right now, too. In under two
hours we'll be a fine target for more bombs, and it would be good to
start ahead of time."
Mike made a gesture and went floating out of the kitchen, air-swimming
to go get space suits from the ship. The grin on his small face
threatened to cut his throat. Joe asked, "Sanford's in command. How'll
he like this idea?"
Brent hesitated. "I'm afraid," he said regretfully, "he won't like it.
If you solve a problem he gave up, it will tear his present adjustment
to bits. He's gone psychotic. I think, though, that he'll allow it to be
tried while he swears at us for fools. He's most likely to react that
way if you suggest it."
"Then," agreed Joe, "I suggest it. Chief----"
The Chief raised a large brown hand.
"I got the program, Joe," he said. "We'll all get set."
And Joe went floating unhappily through passage-tubes to the control
room. He heard Sanford's voice, sardonic and mocking, as he reached the
communications room door.
"What do you expect?" Sanford was saying derisively. "We're clay
pigeons. We're a perfect target. We've just so much ammunition now. You
say you may send us more in three weeks instead of a month. I admire
your persistence, but it's really no use! This is all a very stupid
business...."
He felt Joe's presence. He turned, and then sharply struck the
communicator switch with the heel of his hand. The image on the
television screen died. The voice cut off. He said blandly: "Well?"
"I want," said Joe, "to take a garbage-disposal party out on the outside
of the Platform. I came to ask for authority."
Sanford looked at him in mocking surprise.
"To be sure it seems as intelligent as anything else the human race has
ever done," he observed. "But why does it appeal to you as something you
want to do?"
"I think," Joe told him, "that we can make a defense against bombs from
Earth with our empty tin cans."
Sanford raised his eyebrows.
"If you happen to have a four-leaf clover with you," he said in fine
irony, "I'm told they're good, too."
His eyes were bright and scornful. His manner was feverishly derisive.
Joe would have done well to let it go at that. But he was nettled.
"We set off the last bombs," he said doggedly, "by shooting our landing
rockets at them. They didn't collide with the bombs. They simply
touched off the bombs' proximity fuses. If we surround the Platform with
a cluster of tin cans and such things, they may do as well. Things we
throw away won't drop to Earth. Ultimately, they'll actually circle us,
like satellites themselves. But if we can get enough of them between us
and Earth, any bombs that come up will have their proximity fuses
detonated by the floating trash we throw out."
Sanford laughed.
"We might ask for aluminum-foil ribbon to come up in the next supply
ship," said Joe. "We could have masses of that, or maybe metallic dust
floating around us."
"I much prefer used tin cans," said Sanford humorously. "I'll take the
watch here and let everybody go out with you. By all means we must
defend ourselves. Forward with the garbage! Go ahead!"
His eyes were almost hysterically scornful as he waited for Joe to
leave. Joe did not like it at all, but there was nothing to do but get
out.
He found the Chief with a net bag filled with emptied tin cans. Haney
had another. There were two more, carried by members of the Platform's
four-man crew. They were donning their space suits when Joe came upon
them. Mike was grotesque in the cut-down outfit built for him. Actually,
the only difference was in the size of the fabric suit and the length of
the arms and legs. He could carry a talkie outfit with its batteries,
and the oxygen tank for breathing as well as anybody, since out here
weight did not count at all. There were plastic ropes, resistant to
extremes of temperature.
Joe got into his own space suit. It was no such self-contained space
craft in itself as the fantastic story tellers dreamed of. It was not
much more than an altitude suit, aluminized to withstand the blazing
heat of sunshine in emptiness, and with extravagantly insulated soles to
the magnetic boots. In theory, there simply is no temperature in space.
In practice, a metal hull heats up in sunshine to very much more than
any record-hot-day temperature on Earth. In shadow, too, a metal hull
will drop very close to minus 250 degrees Centigrade, which is something
like 400 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. But mainly the space boots were
insulated against the almost dull-red-heat temperatures of
long-continued sunshine.
A crewman named Corey moved into an airlock with one of the bags of
empty tin cans. Brent watched in a routine fashion through a glass in
the lock-door. The pumps began to exhaust the air from the airlock.
Corey's space suit inflated visibly. Presently the pump stopped. Corey
opened the outer door. He went out, paying plastic rope behind him. An
instant later he reappeared and removed the rope. He'd made his line
fast outside. He closed the outer lock-door. Air surged into the lock
and Haney crowded in. Again the pumping. Then Haney went out, and was
anchored to the Platform not only by his magnetic boots but by a rope
fastened to a hand-hold. Brent went out. Mike. Joe came next.
They stood on the hull of the Space Platform, waiting in the incredible
harsh sunshine of emptiness. The bright steel plates of the hull swelled
and curved away on every hand. There were myriads of stars and the vast
round bulk of Earth seemed farther away to a man in a space suit than to
a man looking out a port. Where shadows cut across the Platform's
irregular surface, there was utter blackness. Also there was horrible
frigidity. Elsewhere it was blindingly bright. The men were specks of
humanity standing on a shining metal hull, and all about them there was
the desolation of nothingness.
But Joe felt strangely proud. The seventh man came out of the lock-door.
They tied their plastic ropes together and spread out in a long line
which went almost around the Platform. The man next to the lock was
anchored to a steel hand-hold. The third man of the line also anchored
himself. The fifth. The seventh. They were a straggling line of figures
with impossibly elongated shadows, held together by ropes. They were
peculiarly like a party of weirdly costumed mountaineers on a glacier of
gleaming silver.
But no mountain climbers ever had a background of ten thousand million
stars, peering up from below them as well as from overhead. Nor did any
ever have a mottled greenish planet rolling by 4,000 miles beneath
them, nor a blazing sun glaring down at them from a sky such as this.
In particular, perhaps, no other explorers ever set out upon an
expedition whose purpose was to throw tin cans and dried refuse at all
the shining cosmos.
They set to work. The space suits were inevitably clumsy. It was not
easy to throw hard with only magnetism to hold one to his feet. It was
actually more practical to throw straight up with an underhand gesture.
But even that would send the tin cans an enormous distance, in time.
There was no air to slow them.
The tin cans twinkled as they left the Platform's steel expanse. They
moved away at a speed of possibly 20 to 30 miles an hour. They floated
off in all possible directions. They would never reach Earth, of course.
They shared the Platform's orbital speed, and they would circle the
Earth with it forever. But when they were thrown away, their orbits were
displaced a little. Each can thrown downward just now, for example,
would always be between the Platform and the Earth on this side of its
orbit. But on the other side of Earth it would be above the Platform.
The Platform, in fact, became the center of a swarm, a cluster, a cloud
of infinitesimal objects which would always accompany it and always be
in motion with regard to it. Together, they should make up a screen no
proximity fuse bomb could pierce without exploding.
Joe heard clankings, transmitted to his body through his feet.
"What's that?" he demanded sharply. "It sounds like the airlock!"
Voices mingled in his ears. The other walkie-talkies allowed everybody
to speak at once. Most of them did. Then Joe heard someone laugh. It was
Sanford's voice.
Sandford's aluminized, space-suited figure came clanking around the
curve of the small metal world. The antenna of his walkie-talkie
glittered above his head. He seemed to swagger against the background of
many-colored stars.
Brent spoke quickly, before anyone else could question Sanford. His
tone was mild and matter of fact, but Joe somehow knew the tension
behind it.
"Hello, Sanford. You came out? Was it wise? Shouldn't there be someone
inside the Platform?"
Sanford laughed again. "It was very wise. We're going to be killed, as
you fellows know perfectly well. It's futile to try to avoid it. So very
sensibly I've decided to spare myself the nuisance of waiting to be
killed. I came out."
There was silence in the ear-phones of Joe's space suit radio. He heard
his own heart beating loudly and steadily in the absolute stillness.
"Incidentally," said Sanford with almost hysterical amusement, "I fixed
it so that none of us can get back in. It would be useless, anyhow.
Everything's futility. So I've put an end to our troubles for good. I've
locked us all out."
He laughed yet again. And Joe knew that in Sanford's madness it was
perfectly possible for him to have done exactly what he said.
There were eight human beings on the Platform. All were now outside it,
on its outer skin. They wore space suits with from half an hour to an
hour's oxygen supply. They had no tools with which to break back into
the satellite. And no help could possibly reach them in less than three
weeks.
If they couldn't get back inside the Platform, Sanford, laughing
proudly, had killed them all.
4
There was a babbling of angry, strained, tense voices in Joe's
headphones. Then the Chief roared for silence. It fell, save for
Sanford's quiet, hysterical chuckling. Joe found himself rather absurdly
thinking that Sanford was not actually insane, except as any man may be
who believes only in his own cleverness. Sooner or later it is bound to
fail him. On Earth, Sanford's pride in his own intellect had been
useful. He had been brilliant because he accepted every problem and
every difficulty as a challenge. But with the Platform's situation
seemingly hopeless, he'd been starkly unable to face the fact that he
wasn't clever or brilliant or intelligent enough. If Joe's solution to
the proximity fuse bombs had been offered before his emotional collapse,
he could have accepted it grandly, and in so doing have made it his own.
But it was too late for that now. He'd given up and worked up a frantic
scorn for the universe he could not cope with. For Joe's trick to work
would have made him inferior even to Joe in his own view. And he
couldn't have that! Even to die, with the prospect that others would
survive him, was an intolerable prospect. He had to be smarter than
anybody else.
So he chuckled. The Chief roared wrathfully into his transmitter:
"Quiet! This crazy fool's tried to commit suicide for all of us! How
about it? Why can't we get back in? How many locks----"
Joe found himself thinking hard. He could be angry later. Now there
wasn't time. Thirty or forty minutes of breathing. No tools. A steel
hull. The airlocks were naturally arranged for the greatest possible
safety under normal conditions. In every airlock it had naturally been
arranged so that the door to space and the door to the interior could
not be open at the same time. That was to save lives. To save air, it
would naturally be arranged that the door to space couldn't be opened
until the lock was pumped empty.
That in itself could be an answer. Joe said sharply, "Hold it, Chief!
Somebody watch Sanford! All we've got to do is find which lock he came
out of. He couldn't get out until he pumped it empty--and that unlocks
the outer door!"
But Sanford laughed once more. He sounded like someone in the highest of
high good humor.
"Heroic again, eh? But I took a compressed air bottle in the lock with
me. When the outer door was open, I opened the stopcock and shut the
door. The air bottle filled the lock behind me. Naturally I'd fasten the
door after I came out! One must be intelligent!"