Clarke, Arthur C - SSC 04 (7 page)

           
Almost at once we launched ourselves
out through the shattered wall, into the full blast of the sun. I was instantly
blinded – but that didn’t matter, because the men waiting in space suits
grabbed me as soon as I emerged and hustled me into the air lock. And there,
sound slowly returned as the air rushed in, and we remembered we could breathe
again. The entire rescue, they told us later, had lasted just twenty seconds …

           
Well, we were the founding members
of the Vacuum-Breathers’ Club. Since then, at least a dozen other men have done
the same thing, in similar emergencies. The record time in space is now two
minutes; after that, the blood begins to form bubbles as it boils at body
temperature, and those bubbles soon get to the heart.

           
In my case, there was only one aftereffect.
For maybe a quarter of a minute I had been exposed to
real
sunlight, not the feeble stuff that filters down through the
atmosphere of Earth. Breathing space didn’t hurt me at all – but I got the
worst dose of sunburn I’ve ever had in my life.

           
Not many of you, I suppose, can
imagine the time before the satellite relays gave us our present world
communications system. When I was a boy, it was impossible to send TV
programmes across the oceans, or even to establish reliable radio contact
around the curve of the Earth without picking up a fine assortment of crackles
and bangs on the way. Yet now we take interference-free circuits for granted,
and think nothing of seeing our friends on the other side of the globe as
clearly as if we were standing face to face. Indeed, it’s a simple fact that
without the satellite relays, the whole structure of world commerce and
industry would collapse. Unless we were up here on the space stations to bounce
their messages around the globe, how do you think any of the world’s big
business organisations could keep their widely scattered electronic brains in
touch with each other?

           
But all this was still in the
future, back in the late seventies, when we were finishing work on the Relay
Chain. I’ve already told you about some of our problems and near disasters;
they were serious enough at the time, but in the end we overcame them all. The
three stations spaced around Earth were no longer piles of girders, air
cylinders, and plastic pressure chambers. Their assembly had been completed, we
had moved aboard, and could now work in comfort, unhampered by space suits. And
we had gravity again, now that the stations had been set slowly spinning. Not
real gravity, of course; but centrifugal force feels exactly the same when
you’re out in space. It was pleasant being able to pour drinks and to sit down
without drifting away on the first air current.

           
Once the three stations had been
built, there was still a year’s solid work to be done installing all the radio
and TV equipment that would lift the world’s communications networks into
space. It was a great day when we established the first TV link between
England
and
Australia
. The signal was beamed up to us in Relay
Two, as we sat above the centre of Africa, we flashed it across to Three –
poised over New Guinea – and they shot it down to Earth again, clear and clean
after its ninety-thousand-mile journey.

           
These, however, were the engineers’
private tests. The official opening of the system would be the biggest event in
the history of world communication – an elaborate global telecast, in which
every nation would take part. It would be a three-hour show, as for the first
time the live TV camera roamed around the world, proclaiming to mankind that
the last barrier of distance was down.

           
The programme planning, it was
cynically believed, had taken as much effort as the building of the space
stations in the first place, and of all the problems the planners had to solve,
the most difficult was that of choosing a
compère
or master of ceremonies to introduce the items in the elaborate global show
that would be watched by half the human race.

           
Heaven knows how much conniving,
blackmail, and downright character assassination went on behind the scenes. All
we knew was that a week before the great day, a nonscheduled rocket came up to
orbit with Gregory Wendell aboard. This was quite a surprise, since Gregory
wasn’t as big a TV personality as, say, Jeffers Jackson in the
US
or Vince Clifford in
Britain
. However, it seemed that the big boys had
cancelled each other out, and Gregg had got the coveted job through one of
those compromises so well known to politicians.

           
Gregg had started his career as a
disc jockey on a university radio station in the American Midwest, and had
worked his way up through the
Hollywood
and
Manhattan
night-club circuits until he had a daily,
nationwide programme of his own. Apart from his cynical yet relaxed
personality, his biggest asset was his deep velvet voice, for which he could
probably thank his Negro blood. Even when you flatly disagreed with what he was
saying – even, indeed, when he was tearing you to pieces in an interview – it
was still a pleasure to listen to him.

           
We gave him the grand tour of the
space station, and even (strictly against regulations) took him out through the
air lock in a space suit. He loved it all, but there were two things he liked
in particular. ‘This air you make,’ he said, ‘it beats the stuff we have to
breathe down in
New York
. This is the first time my sinus trouble has gone since I went into
TV.’ He also relished the low gravity; at the station’s rim, a man had half his
normal, Earth weight – and at the axis he had no weight at all.

           
However, the novelty of his
surroundings didn’t distract Gregg from his job. He spent hours at
Communications Central, polishing his script and getting his cues right, and
studying the dozens of monitor screens that would be his windows on the world.
I came across him once while he was running through his introduction of Queen
Elizabeth, who would be speaking from
Buckingham
Palace
at the very end of the programme. He was so
intent on his rehearsal that he never even noticed I was standing beside him.

           
Well, that telecast is now part of
history. For the first time a billion human beings watched a single programme
that came ‘live’ from every corner of the Earth, and was a roll call of the
world’s greatest citizens. Hundreds of cameras on land and sea and air looked
inquiringly at the turning globe; and at the end there was that wonderful shot
of the Earth through a zoom lens on the space station, making the whole planet
recede until it was lost among the stars …

           
There were a few hitches, of course.
One camera on the bed of the
Atlantic
wasn’t ready on cue, and we had to spend some extra time looking at the Taj
Mahal. And owing to a switching error Russian subtitles were superimposed on
the South American transmission, while half the
USSR
found itself trying to read Spanish. But
this was nothing to what
might
have
happened.

           
Through the entire three hours,
introducing the famous and the unknown with equal ease, came the mellow yet
never orotund flow of Gregg’s voice. He did a magnificent job; the
congratulations came pouring up the beam the moment the broadcast finished. But
he didn’t hear them; he made one short, private call to his agent, and then
went to bed.

           
Next morning, the Earth-bound ferry
was waiting to take him back to any job he cared to accept. But it left without
Gregg Wendell, now junior station announcer of Relay Two.

           
‘They’ll think I’m crazy,’ he said,
beaming happily, ‘but why should I go back to that rat race down there? I’ve
all the universe to look at, I can breathe smog-free air, the low gravity makes
me feel a Hercules, and my three darling ex-wives can’t get at me.’ He kissed
his hand to the departing rocket. ‘So long, Earth,’ he called. ‘I’ll be back
when I start pining for Broadway traffic jams and bleary penthouse dawns. And
if I get homesick, I can look at anywhere on the planet just by turning a
switch. Why, I’m more in the middle of things here than I could ever be on
Earth, yet I can cut myself off from the human race whenever I want to.’

           
He was still smiling as he watched
the ferry begin the long fall back to Earth, toward the fame and fortune that
could have been his. And then, whistling cheerfully, he left the observation
lounge in eight-foot strides to read the weather forecast for
Lower Patagonia
.

           
It’s only fair to warn you, right at
the start, that this is a story with no ending. But it has a definite
beginning, for it was while we were both students at Astrotech that I met
Julie. She was in her final year of solar physics when I was graduating, and
during our last year at college we saw a good deal of each other. I’ve still
got the woollen tam-o’shanter she knitted so that I wouldn’t bump my head
against my space helmet. (No, I never had the nerve to wear it.)

           
Unfortunately, when I was assigned
to Satellite Two, Julie went to the Solar Observatory – at the same distance
from Earth, but a couple of degrees eastward along the orbit. So there we were,
sitting twenty-two thousand miles above the middle of
Africa
– but with nine hundred miles of empty,
hostile space between us.

           
At first we were both so busy that
the pang of separation was somewhat lessened. But when the novelty of life in
space had worn off, our thoughts began to bridge the gulf that divided us. And
not only our thoughts, for I’d made friends with the communications people, and
we used to have little chats over the interstation TV circuit. In some ways it
made matters worse seeing each other face to face and never knowing just how
many other people were looking in at the same time. There’s not much privacy in
a space station …

           
Sometimes I’d focus one of our
telescopes onto the distant, brilliant star of the observatory. In the crystal
clarity of space, I could use enormous magnifications, and could see every
detail of our neighbours’ equipment – the solar telescopes, the pressurised
spheres of the living quarters that housed the staff, the slim pencils of
visiting ferry rockets that had climbed up from Earth. Very often there would
be space-suited figures moving among the maze of apparatus, and I would strain
my eyes in a hopeless attempt at identification. It’s hard enough to recognise
anyone in a space suit when you’re only a few feet apart – but that didn’t stop
me from trying.

           
We’d resigned ourselves to waiting,
with what patience we could muster, until our Earth leave was due in six
months’ time, when we had an unexpected stroke of luck. Less than half our tour
of duty had passed when the head of the transport section suddenly announced
that he was going outside with a butterfly net to catch meteors. He didn’t
become violent, but had to be shipped hastily back to Earth. I took over his
job on a temporary basis and now had – in theory at least – the freedom of
space.

           
There were ten of the little
low-powered rocket scooters under my proud command, as well as four of the
larger interstation shuttles used to ferry stores and personnel from orbit to
orbit. I couldn’t hope to borrow one of
those
,
but after several weeks of careful organising I was able to carry out the plan
I’d conceived some two micro-seconds after being told I was now head of
transport.