Clarke, Arthur C - SSC 04 (5 page)

           
‘I am sorry, Mr Prime Minister,’ he
said, ‘if I’ve caused you any alarm. I will return as soon as it is convenient.
Someone has to do everything for the first time, and I felt the moment had come
for a member of my family to leave Earth. It will be a valuable part of my
education, and will make me more fitted to carry out my duty. Goodbye.’

           
He dropped the microphone and walked
over to the observation window – the only spaceward-looking port on the entire
ship. Saunders watched him standing there, proud and lonely – but contented
now. And as he saw the prince staring out at the stars which he had at last
attained, all his annoyance and indignation slowly evaporated.

           
No one spoke for a long time. Then
Prince Henry tore his gaze away from the blinding splendour beyond the port,
looked at Captain Saunders, and smiled.

           
‘Where’s the galley, Captain?’ he
asked. ‘I may be out of practice, but when I used to go scouting I was the best
cook in my patrol.’

           
Saunders slowly relaxed, then smiled
back. The tension seemed to lift from the control room. Mars was still a long
way off, but he knew now that this wasn’t going to be such a bad trip after
all….

First published in
Infinity Science Fiction Magazine
, September/October 1957Collected
in
The Other Side of the Sky
The
success of the earlier set of linked short stories, ‘Venture to the Moon’, led
to the writing of this series which by good luck appeared on the London
newsstands just when Sputnik I appeared in the sky.
  
Special Delivery

           
I can still remember the excitement,
back in 1957, when
Russia
launched the first artificial satellites
and managed to hang a few pounds of instruments up here above the atmosphere.
Of course, I was only a kid at the time, but I went out in the evening like
everyone else, trying to spot those little magnesium spheres as they zipped
through the twilight sky hundreds of miles above my head. It’s strange to think
that some of them are still there – but that now they’re
below
me, and I’d have to look down toward Earth if I wanted to see
them …

           
Yes, a lot has happened in the last
forty years, and sometimes I’m afraid that you people down on Earth take the
space stations for granted, forgetting the skill and science and courage that
went to make them. How often do you stop to think that all your long-distance
phone calls, and most of your TV programmes, are routed through one or the
other of the satellites? And how often do you give any credit to the
meteorologists up here for the fact that weather forecasts are no longer the
joke they were to our grandfathers, but are dead accurate ninety-nine per cent
of the time?

           
It was a rugged life, back in the
seventies, when I went up to work on the outer stations. They were being rushed
into operation to open up the millions of new TV and radio circuits which would
be available as soon as we had transmitters out in space that could beam
programmes to anywhere on the globe.

           
The first artificial satellites had
been very close to Earth, but the three stations forming the great triangle of
the Relay Chain had to be twenty-two thousand miles up, spaced equally around
the equator. At this altitude – and at no other – they would take exactly a day
to go around their orbit, and so would stay poised forever over the same spot
on the turning Earth.

           
In my time I’ve worked on all three
of the stations, but my first tour of duty was aboard Relay Two. That’s almost
exactly over
Entebbe
,
Uganda
, and provides service for
Europe
,
Africa
, and
most of
Asia
. Today it’s a huge structure hundreds of
yards across, beaming thousands of simultaneous programmes down to the
hemisphere beneath it as it carries the radio traffic of half the world. But
when I saw it for the first time from the port of the ferry rocket that carried
me up to orbit, it looked like a junk pile adrift in space. Prefabricated parts
were floating around in hopeless confusion, and it seemed impossible that any
order could ever emerge from this chaos.

           
Accommodation for the technical
staff and assembling crews was primitive, consisting of a few unserviceable
ferry rockets that had been stripped of everything except air purifiers. ‘The
Hulks’, we christened them; each man had just enough room for himself and a
couple of cubic feet of personal belongings. There was a fine irony in the fact
that we were living in the midst of infinite space – and hadn’t room to swing a
cat.

           
It was a great day when we heard
that the first pressurised living quarters were on their way up to us –
complete with needle-jet shower baths that would operate even here, where water
– like everything else – had no weight. Unless you’ve lived aboard an
overcrowded spaceship, you won’t appreciate what that meant. We could throw
away our damp sponges and feel really clean at last …

           
Nor were the showers the only luxury
promised us. On the way up from Earth was an inflatable lounge spacious enough
to hold no fewer than eight people, a microfilm library, a magnetic billiard
table, lightweight chess sets, and similar novelties for bored spacemen. The
very thought of all these comforts made our cramped life in the Hulks seem
quite unendurable, even though we were being paid about a thousand dollars a
week to endure it.

           
Starting from the Second Refuelling
Zone, two thousand miles above Earth, the eagerly awaited ferry rocket would
take about six hours to climb up to us with its precious cargo. I was off duty
at the time, and stationed myself at the telescope where I’d spent most of my
scanty leisure. It was impossible to grow tired of exploring the great world
hanging there in space beside us; with the highest power of the telescope, one
seemed to be only a few miles above the surface. When there were no clouds and
the seeing was good, objects the size of a small house were easily visible. I
had never been to
Africa
, but I grew to know it well while I was off
duty in Station Two. You may not believe this, but I’ve often spotted elephants
moving across the plains, and the immense herds of zebras and antelopes were
easy to see as they flowed back and forth like living tides on the great
reservations.

           
But my favourite spectacle was the
dawn coming up over the mountains in the heart of the continent. The line of
sunlight would come sweeping across the
Indian Ocean
, and the new day would extinguish the tiny
twinkling galaxies of the cities shining in the darkness below me. Long before
the sun had reached the lowlands around them, the peaks of Kilimanjaro and
Mount Kenya
would be blazing in the dawn, brilliant
stars still surrounded by the night. As the sun rose higher, the day would
march swiftly down their slopes and the valleys would fill with light. Earth
would then be at its first quarter, waxing toward full.

           
Twelve hours later, I would see the
reverse process as the same mountains caught the last rays of the setting sun.
They would blaze for a little while in the narrow belt of twilight; then Earth
would spin into darkness, and night would fall upon
Africa
.

           
It was not the beauty of the
terrestrial globe I was concerned with now. Indeed, I was not even looking at
Earth, but at the fierce blue-white star high above the western edge of the
planet’s disc. The automatic freighter was eclipsed in Earth’s shadow; what I
was seeing was the incandescent flare of its rockets as they drove it up on its
twenty-thousand-mile climb.

           
I had watched ships ascending to us
so often that I knew every stage of their manoeuvre by heart. So when the
rockets didn’t wink out, but continued to burn steadily, I knew within seconds
that something was wrong. In sick, helpless fury I watched all our longed-for
comforts – and, worse still, our mail! – moving faster and faster along the
unintended orbit. The freighter’s auto-pilot had jammed; had there been a human
pilot aboard, he could have overridden the controls and cut the motor, but now
all the fuel that should have driven the ferry on its two-way trip was being
burned in one continuous blast of power.

           
By the time the fuel tanks had
emptied, and that distant star had flickered and died in the field of my
telescope, the tracking stations had confirmed what I already knew. The
freighter was moving far too fast for Earth’s gravity to recapture it – indeed,
it was heading into the cosmic wilderness beyond Pluto …

           
It took a long time for morale to
recover, and it only made matters worse when someone in the computing section
worked out the future history of our errant freighter. You see, nothing is ever
really lost in space. Once you’ve calculated its orbit, you know where it is
until the end of eternity. As we watched our lounge, our library, our games,
our mail receding to the far horizons of the solar system, we knew that it
would all come back one day, in perfect condition. If we have a ship standing
by it will be easy to intercept it the second time it comes around the sun –
quite early in the spring of the year AD 15,862.

           
To the best of my knowledge, there’s
never been a regulation that forbids one to keep pets in a space station. No
one ever thought it was necessary – and even had such a rule existed, I am
quite certain that Sven Olsen would have ignored it.

           
With a name like that, you will
picture Sven at once as a six-foot-six Nordic giant, built like a bull and with
a voice to match. Had this been so, his chances of getting a job in space would
have been very slim; actually he was a wiry little fellow, like most of the early
spacers, and managed to qualify easily for the 150-pound bonus that kept so
many of us on a reducing diet.

           
Sven was one of our best
construction men, and excelled at the tricky and specialised work of collecting
assorted girders as they floated around in free fall, making them do the
slow-motion, three-dimensional ballet that would get them into their right
positions, and fusing the pieces together when they were precisely dovetailed
into the intended pattern. I never tired of watching him and his gang as the
station grew under their hands like a giant jigsaw puzzle; it was a skilled and
difficult job, for a space suit is not the most convenient of garbs in which to
work. However, Sven’s team had one great advantage over the construction gangs
you see putting up skyscrapers down on Earth. They could step back and admire
their handiwork without being abruptly parted from it by gravity …

           
Don’t ask me why Sven wanted a pet,
or why he chose the one he did. I’m not a psychologist, but I must admit that
his selection was very sensible. Claribel weighed practically nothing, her food
requirements were infinitesimal – and she was not worried, as most animals
would have been, by the absence of gravity.

           
I first became aware that Claribel
was aboard when I was sitting in the little cubbyhole laughingly called my
office, checking through my lists of technical stores to decide what items we’d
be running out of next. When I heard the musical whistle beside my ear, I
assumed that it had come over the station intercom, and waited for an
announcement to follow. It didn’t; instead, there was a long and involved
pattern of melody that made me look up with such a start that I forgot all
about the angle beam just behind my head. When the stars had ceased to explode
before my eyes, I had my first view of Claribel.