Clarke, Arthur C - SSC 04 (6 page)

           
She was a small yellow canary,
hanging in the air as motionless as a hummingbird – and with much less effort,
for her wings were quietly folded along her sides. We stared at each other for
a minute; then, before I had quite recovered my wits, she did a curious kind of
backward loop I’m sure no earthbound canary had ever managed, and departed with
a few leisurely flicks. It was quite obvious that she’d already learned how to
operate in the absence of gravity, and did not believe in doing unnecessary
work.

           
Sven didn’t confess to her ownership
for several days, and by that time it no longer mattered, because Claribel was
a general pet. He had smuggled her up on the last ferry from Earth, when he
came back from leave – partly, he claimed, out of sheer scientific curiosity.
He wanted to see just how a bird would operate when it had no weight but could
still use its wings.

           
Claribel thrived and grew fat. On
the whole, we had little trouble concealing our unauthorised guest when VIPs
from Earth came visiting. A space station has more hiding places than you can
count; the only problem was that Claribel got rather noisy when she was upset,
and we sometimes had to think fast to explain the curious peeps and whistles
that came from ventilating shafts and storage bulkheads. There were a couple of
narrow escapes – but then who would dream of looking for a canary in a space
station?

           
We were now on twelve-hour watches,
which was not as bad as it sounds, since you need little sleep in space. Though
of course there is no ‘day’ and ‘night’ when you are floating in permanent
sunlight, it was still convenient to stick to the terms. Certainly when I woke
up that ‘morning’ it felt like
6.00 a.m.
on Earth. I had a nagging headache, and vague
memories of fitful, disturbed dreams. It took me ages to undo my bunk straps,
and I was still only half awake when I joined the remainder of the duty crew in
the mess. Breakfast was unusually quiet, and there was one seat vacant.

           
‘Where’s Sven?’ I asked, not very
much caring.

           
‘He’s looking for Claribel,’ someone
answered. ‘Says he can’t find her anywhere. She usually wakes him up.’

           
Before I could retort that she
usually woke me up, too, Sven came in through the doorway, and we could see at
once that something was wrong. He slowly opened his hand, and there lay a tiny
bundle of yellow feathers, with two clenched claws sticking pathetically up
into the air.

           
‘What happened?’ we asked, all
equally distressed.

           
‘I don’t know,’ said Sven
mournfully. ‘I just found her like this.’

           
‘Let’s have a look at her,’ said
Jock Duncan, our cook-doctor-dietitian. We all waited in hushed silence while
he held Claribel against his ear in an attempt to detect any heartbeat.

           
Presently he shook his head. ‘I
can’t hear anything, but that doesn’t prove she’s dead. I’ve never listened to
a canary’s heart,’ he added rather apologetically.

           
‘Give her a shot of oxygen,’
suggested somebody, pointing to the green-banded emergency cylinder in its
recess beside the door. Everyone agreed that this was an excellent idea, and
Claribel was tucked snugly into a face mask that was large enough to serve as a
complete oxygen tent for her.

           
To our delighted surprise, she
revived at once. Beaming broadly, Sven removed the mask, and she hopped onto
his finger. She gave her series of ‘Come to the cookhouse, boys’ trills – then
promptly keeled over again.

           
‘I don’t get it,’ lamented Sven.
‘What’s wrong with her? She’s never done this before.’

           
For the last few minutes, something
had been tugging at my memory. My mind seemed to be very sluggish that morning,
as if I was still unable to cast off the burden of sleep. I felt that I could
do with some of that oxygen – but before I could reach the mask, understanding
exploded in my brain. I whirled on the duty engineer and said urgently:

           
‘Jim! There’s something wrong with
the air! That’s why Claribel’s passed out. I’ve just remembered that miners
used to carry canaries down to warn them of gas.’

           
‘Nonsense!’ said Jim. ‘The alarms
would have gone off. We’ve got duplicate circuits, operating independently.’

           
‘Er – the second alarm circuit isn’t
connected up yet,’ his assistant reminded him. That shook Jim; he left without
a word, while we stood arguing and passing the oxygen bottle around like a pipe
of peace.

           
He came back ten minutes later with
a sheepish expression. It was one of those accidents that couldn’t possibly
happen; we’d had one of our rare eclipses by Earth’s shadow that night; part of
the air purifier had frozen up, and the single alarm in the circuit had failed
to go off. Half a million dollars’ worth of chemical and electronic engineering
had let us down completely. Without Claribel, we should soon have been slightly
dead.

           
So now, if you visit any space
station, don’t be surprised if you hear an inexplicable snatch of bird song.
There’s no need to be alarmed: on the contrary, in fact. It will mean that
you’re being doubly safeguarded, at practically no extra expense.

           
A long time ago I discovered that people
who’ve never left Earth have certain fixed ideas about conditions in space.
Everyone ‘knows’, for example, that a man dies instantly and horribly when
exposed to the vacuum that exists beyond the atmosphere. You’ll find numerous
gory descriptions of exploded space travellers in the popular literature, and I
won’t spoil your appetite by repeating them here. Many of those tales, indeed,
are basically true. I’ve pulled men back through the air lock who were very
poor advertisements for space flight.

           
Yet, at the same time, there are
exceptions to every rule – even this one. I should know, for I learned the hard
way.

           
We were on the last stages of
building Communications Satellite Two; all the main units had been joined
together, the living quarters had been pressurised, and the station had been
given the slow spin around its axis that had restored the unfamiliar sensation
of weight. I say ‘slow’, but at its rim our two-hundred-foot-diameter wheel was
turning at thirty miles an hour. We had, of course, no sense of motion, but the
centrifugal force caused by this spin gave us about half the weight we would
have possessed on Earth. That was enough to stop things from drifting around,
yet not enough to make us feel uncomfortably sluggish after our weeks with no
weight at all.

           
Four of us were sleeping in the
small cylindrical cabin known as Bunk-house Number 6 on the night that it
happened. The bunkhouse was at the very rim of the station; if you imagine a
bicycle wheel, with a string of sausages replacing the tyre, you have a good
idea of the layout. Bunkhouse Number 6 was one of these sausages, and we were
slumbering peacefully inside it.

           
I was awakened by a sudden jolt that
was not violent enough to cause me alarm, but which did make me sit up and
wonder what had happened. Anything unusual in a space station demands instant
attention, so I reached for the intercom switch by my bed. ‘Hello, Central,’ I
called. ‘What was that?’

           
There was no reply; the line was
dead.

           
Now thoroughly alarmed, I jumped out
of bed – and had an even bigger shock.
There
was no gravity
. I shot up to the ceiling before I was able to grab a
stanchion and bring myself to a halt, at the cost of a sprained wrist.

           
It was impossible for the entire
station to have suddenly stopped rotating. There was only one answer; the
failure of the intercom and, as I quickly discovered, of the lighting circuit
as well forced us to face the appalling truth. We were no longer part of the
station; our little cabin had somehow come adrift, and had been slung off into
space like a raindrop falling on a spinning flywheel.

           
There were no windows through which
we could look out, but we were not in complete darkness for the battery-powered
emergency lights had come on. All the main air vents had closed automatically
when the pressure dropped. For the time being, we could live in our own private
atmosphere, even though it was not being renewed. Unfortunately, a steady
whistling told us that the air we did have was escaping through a leak
somewhere in the cabin.

           
There was no way of telling what had
happened to the rest of the station. For all we knew, the whole structure might
have come to pieces, and all our colleagues might be dead or in the same
predicament as we – drifting through space in leaking cans of air. Our one slim
hope was the possibility that we were the only castaways, that the rest of the
station was intact and had been able to send a rescue team to find us. After
all, we were receding at no more than thirty miles an hour, and one of the
rocket scooters could catch up to us in minutes.

           
It actually took an hour, though
without the evidence of my watch I should never have believed that it was so
short a time. We were now gasping for breath, and the gauge on our single
emergency oxygen tank had dropped to one division above zero.

           
The banging on the wall seemed like
a signal from another world. We banged back vigorously, and a moment later a
muffled voice called to us through the wall. Someone outside was lying with his
space-suit helmet pressed against the metal, and his shouted words were
reaching us by direct conduction. Not as clear as radio – but it worked.

           
The oxygen gauge crept slowly down
to zero while we had our council of war. We would be dead before we could be
towed back to the station; yet the rescue ship was only a few feet away from
us, with its air lock already open. Our little problem was to cross that few
feet –
without
space suits.

           
We made our plans carefully,
rehearsing our actions in the full knowledge that there could be no repeat
performance. Then we each took a deep, final swig of oxygen, flushing out our
lungs. When we were all ready, I banged on the wall to give the signal to our
friends waiting outside.

           
There was a series of short,
staccato raps as the power tools got to work on the thin hull. We clung tightly
to the stanchions, as far away as possible from the point of entry, knowing
just what would happen. When it came, it was so sudden that the mind couldn’t
record the sequence of events. The cabin seemed to explode, and a great wind
tugged at me. The last trace of air gushed from my lungs, through my
already-opened mouth. And then – utter silence, and the stars shining through
the gaping hole that led to life.

           
Believe me, I didn’t stop to analyse
my sensations. I think – though I can never be sure that it wasn’t imagination
– that my eyes were smarting and there was a tingling feeling all over my body.
And I felt very cold, perhaps because evaporation was already starting from my
skin.

           
The only thing I can be certain of
is that uncanny silence. It is never completely quiet in a space station, for
there is always the sound of machinery or air pumps. But this was the absolute
silence of the empty void, where there is no trace of air to carry sound.