Ticker paused in his eating to appreciate the skill of the pistol user; it looked easy, but everyone who had ever tried it knew that it was a great deal easier to set oneself and the load spinning giddily all ways over. That did not happen so often now that the really ham-handed had been weeded out, but a little misjudgement could start it in a moment. He grunted approval, and went on eating, and reflecting....
Four days now, four more days, and he would be back home again. ... And how many spells before it would be finished? he wondered. They were holding a sweep on that, with quite a nice prize. The schedules drawn up in comfortable offices back on Earth had gone to pieces at once. In real experience of the conditions progress with the earlier stages had been a great deal slower than the estimates had reckoned. Tricks, techniques, and devices had to be evolved to meet difficulties that the most careful consideration had overlooked. There had also been two bad hold-ups: one, because someone in logistics had made a crass error in the order of dispatch, the other on account of a parcel of girders that had never arrived, and was now presumably circling the Earth as a lonely satellite on its own account - if it had not shot away into space.
Working in weightless conditions had also been more troublesome than they had expected. It was true that objects of great bulk and solidity could be shifted by a touch, so that mechanical handling was unnecessary; but on the other hand, there was always the ‘equal and opposite reaction’ to be considered and dealt with. One was for ever seeking anchorage and purchase before any force whatever could be applied. The lifetime habit of depending on one’s weight was only slightly less than an instinct; the mind went on assuming that weight, just as it went on trying to think in terms of ‘up and down’ until it had been called to order innumerable times.
Ticker left off watching the guided drift of the cylinder, and took a final jet of coffee. He looked at the clock. Still half an hour to go before the shift changed; twenty minutes before he need start getting into his space-suit and testing it. He lit a cigarette, and because there was nothing else to do, found himself moodily contemplating the scene outside once more. The cigarette was half finished when the ship’s speaker system grated, and announced:
‘Mr Troon please call at the radio-cabin. Radio message for Mr Troon, please.’
Ticker stared at the nearest speaker for an apprehensive moment, and then ground out the remains of his cigarette against the metal wall. With a clicking and scraping of magnetic soles he made his way out of the mess-room. In the passage he disregarded the rules, and sent himself scudding along with a shove. He caught the radio-cabin’s door-handle and grounded his feet in one complicated movement. The radio operator looked up.
‘Quick worker, Ticker. Here you are.’ He handed over a folded piece of paper.
Ticker took it in a hand that irritated him by shaking slightly. The message was brief. It said simply:
’Happy birthday from Laura and Michael.’
He stood staring at it for some seconds, and then wiped his hand across his forehead. The radio man looked at him thoughtfully.
‘Funny things happen in space,’ he remarked. ‘Must be quite six months since you last had a birthday. Many happy returns, all the same.’
‘Er - ah - yes - thanks,’ said Ticker vaguely, and pulled himself out of the cabin.
Outside, he stood reading the short message again.
Michael, they had decided, if it were a boy: Anna, for a girl. But early, by at least a fortnight. Still, what did that matter? - except that he had hoped to be on hand. The important thing was ‘happy birthday’, which meant ‘both doing well’.
He became untranced suddenly, and pushed back into the radio-cabin. The dressing-bell for the next shift went while he was scribbling his reply. A few moments later he was whizzing down the passage, headed for the suit-store.
When Ticker’s turn came, he stepped to the edge of the open airlock, clipped the eye of his short lead round the guide-line, and then with a two-legged push-off against the side of the hulk, sent himself shooting out along the line towards the assembly. Practice had given all of them a pride in their ability to deal dexterously with the conditions; a quick twist, something like that of a falling cat, brought his feet round to act as buffers at the end of his journey. He hooked on to a local life-line then unhooked from the guide line, obeying the outside worker’s Rule Number One - that he should never for a moment work unattached. Then he pushed across to the far side of the frame where assembly was going on. One of the workers there saw him coming, and turned his head towards him so that his tight-beam radio sounded in Ticker’s helmet louder than the all-round reception.
‘All yours,’ he said. ‘And welcome to it. This plate’s a bastard,’
Ticker came up to him. They exchanged lines.
‘Be seeing you,’ said the other, and gave a yank on the line which took him back the way Ticker had come. Ticker shook his new safety-line to send it looping out of his way, and turned to give his consideration to the plate that was a bastard.
The new shift adjusted their general intercom radios to low power so that they could converse comfortably between themselves. They noticed the progress made since their last spell, compared it with the plan, identified the sections at hand, and started in.
Ticker looked his plate over, and then twisted it so that the markings lined up. It was no bastard after all, and slipped quite easily into place. He was not surprised. One got tired, and not infrequently a little stupid, by the end of a shift.
With the plate fixed, he paused, looking out at Earth with his eyeshield raised so that he saw it fully, in all its brilliance - a great shimmering globe that filled half the sky. Quite extensive patches here and there were free of cloud now, and through them there was blue; the sea, perhaps - and then again, perhaps not, for whenever one saw the surface it looked blue, just as the blackness of space seen from the Earth in daylight looked blue.
Somewhere over there, on that great shining ball, he now had a son. The idea came to him as a marvel. He could picture Laura smiling as she held the baby to her. He smiled to himself, and then chuckled. He had smuggled himself a family in spite of the regulations, and if they did find out now - he shrugged. And anyway, he had a well-grounded suspicion that he was not the only family man among his supposedly celibate companions. He did not underestimate the Security boys; he simply thought it likely that others besides the Air Marshal found a blind eye convenient. In just four days more - A nudge at his back interrupted him. He turned to find another plate that someone had pushed along for his attention. Gripping a girder between his knees for anchorage, he started to twist it into position.
Half an hour later a tight-beam radio voice from the hulk overrode their local conversation.
‘Unidentified object coming up,’ it announced, and gave a constellation bearing. The working party’s heads turned towards Aries. The great stars flaring there against the multitudinous speckling of the rest looked no different from usual.
‘Not a dispatch, you mean?’ someone asked.
‘Can’t be. We’ve had none notified.’
‘Meteor?’ someone else suggested, with a trace of uneasiness.
‘We don’t think so. There’s been a slight change of course since radar picked it up a couple of hours ago. That seems to rule out meteors.’
‘Can’t you get the telescope on it?’
‘Only for a glimpse. Damned hulk’s hunting too much, we’re trying to steady her up.’
‘Could it be that parcel of girders, do you think? The lot that went astray. Couldn’t it be that its homing gear has just got the range of us?’
‘Might be, I suppose,’ admitted the voice from the hulk. ‘It’s certainly got a line straight on us now. If it is, the proximity gear should stop it and hold it about a couple of miles off, and you’ll need to send somebody out with a line to make it fast. Plenty of time to see about that later. We’ll keep you informed, once we can get this damned tub steady enough to keep the glass on it.’
/>
His wave cut off, and the assembly party, after vainly scanning the Aries region again, turned back to their work. Nearly an hour passed before the voice from the hulk spoke once more.
‘Hullo there, Assembly!‘ it said, and without waiting for acknowledgement, went on: ‘There’s something damned funny about that thing in Aries. It certainly isn’t the girder package. We don’t know what it is.’
‘Well, what’s it look like?’ inquired one of the working party, patiently.
‘It’s - er - well, it’s like a large circle, with three smaller circles set at thirds round the perimeter.’
‘You don’t say!’
‘Well, that’s what we see, damn it! The thing’s head on to us. The circles may be mile-long cylinders, for all we can tell.’
Again the helmeted heads of the working party turned towards Aries.
‘Can’t see anything. Is it blasting?’
‘There’s no sign of blast. It looks as if it’s free-falling at us. Just a minute - ‘ He broke off. Five minutes passed before he came in again. This time his tone was more serious.
‘We radioed a description to base, asking for info, and identification. Their reply is just in. It reads: “No repeat no dispatch you since Number 377K four days ago stop design of object as described not repeat not known here stop Pentagon states not repeat not known them stop consider possible craft/missile hostile stop treat as hostile taking all precautions ends.” ‘
For some moments no one spoke. The helmets of the working party turned as they looked at one another in astonishment.
‘Hostile! For God’s sake! Why, every bloody thing out there’s hostile,’ somebody said.
‘Precautions!‘ said another voice. ‘What precautions?’
Ticker inquired:
‘Have we any interception missiles?’
‘No,’ said the voice from the hulk. ‘They’re scheduled, but they are away down the fitting-out list yet.’
‘Hostile?’ murmured another voice. ‘But who?’
‘Who do you think? Who’d rather we didn’t have a station out here?’
‘But “hostile”,’ the man said again. ‘It would be an act of war - to attack us, I mean.’
‘Act of nothing,’ said the second man. ‘Who even knows we’re up here, except the Department; and now, apparently, the Other Fellows. Say we were attacked, and blown up - what’d happen? Sweet damn all. Nothing but hush from both sides. Not even details... just hush.’
‘Everybody seems to be taking a lot for granted, considering that nobody even knows what the thing is,’ someone pointed out.
That, Ticker admitted, was true enough, but somewhat legalistic, for it was difficult to believe that anything could happen to be travelling this particular section of space by sheer accident, and if it were not accidental, then it followed that the intention of any visiting object that did not originate with their Department must be either observatory or hostile.
He turned his head again, surveying the myriad suns that flared in the blackness. The first comment had been right; it was all hostile. For a moment he felt that hostility all about him more keenly than at any time since he had first forced himself to push out of the hulk’s airlock into nothingness. His memory of that sensation had been dulled, but now, abruptly, he was the intruder again; the presumptuous creature thrusting out of his natural element; precariously self-launched among a wrack of perils. Odd, he thought, in a kind of parenthesis, that it should need the suspicion of human hostility to reawaken the sense of the greater hostility constantly about them.
He became conscious that the others were still talking. Someone had inquired about the object’s speed. The hulk was replying:
‘Difficult to estimate more than roughly, head on, but doesn’t seem to be high, relative to our own. Certainly unlikely to be more than two hundred miles an hour difference, we judge - could well be less. You ought to be able to see it soon. It’s starting to catch the earthlight.’
There was no sign of it in the Aries sector yet. Somebody said:
‘Should we get back aboard, Skip?’
‘No point in it ... It wouldn’t help at all if that thing does have a homer set on the hulk.’
‘True,’ agreed someone, and sang gently: ‘ “Dere’s no hidin’ place out here.” ‘
They went on working, casting occasional glances into the blackness. Ten minutes later, two men exclaimed simultaneously; they had caught one small, brief flare among the stardust.
‘Starboard jet correcting course,’ said the voice from the hulk. ‘That settles one thing. It’s live, and it is homing on us. Swinging now. It’ll recorrect in a moment.’
They watched intently. Presently, nearly all of them caught a glimpse of the little jet of flame that steadied the object’s swing. A man swore:
‘God damn it! And us here, like sitting pigeons. One little guided missile to meet it. That’s all that’s needed. Pity one of the Department’s great brains didn’t allow for that, isn’t it?’
‘What about an oxygen tube?’ someone suggested. ‘Fix up one of the dispatch homers on it, and let it jet itself along till they meet.’
‘Good idea - if we had a day or so to fix the homer,’ agreed another.
Presently the object caught more of the earthlight, and they were able to keep its location marked, though not yet able to distinguish its shape. A consultation went on between the leader of the working party and the commander of the hulk. It was decided not to take the party inboard. If the thing were indeed a missile and set to explode on contact or at close proximity, then the situation would be equally hopeless wherever one was; but should it, on the other hand, fail to explode on contact and simply cause impact damage to the hulk, it might be useful to have the party outside, ready to give what help it could.
On that decision, the men in space-suits started to push themselves off, and drift through the web of girders towards the hulkward side of the assembly. There they exchanged their local safety-lines for others attached to the hulk, and were ready to pull themselves across, if necessary.
They waited in an uneasy group, a surrealist cluster of grotesque figures anchored to the framework at eccentric angles by their magnetic soles while they watched the oncoming object, the ‘craft/missile’ grow slowly larger.
Soon they could distinguish the outline described; three small circles set about a larger. It was from the small circles that a correcting puff of flame came now and then.
‘It’s my guess, from the general look of the thing and its slow speed,’ the hulk Commander’s voice said, dispassionately, ‘that it’s half-missile, half-mine; a kind of hunting mine. I’d guess, too, by the way it is aligned on us that it is a contact type. Might be chemical, or nuclear - probably chemical; if it were nuclear a proximity fuse would be good enough. Besides, a nuclear explosion would be detectable from Earth. With a chemical explosion out here you’d want all the concentration of force you can get - hence contact.’
No one seemed disposed to question the Commander’s deductions. There could be no doubt that it was aligned on them. The swinging was so slight that they could see no more than the head-on view.
‘Estimated relative speed about one hundred and twenty miles an hour,’ added the Commander.
Slow, Ticker thought, very slow - probably to keep manoeuvrability in case of evasive action by its target. There was nothing one could do but stand there and wait for it.
‘E.T.A. now five minutes,’ the voice from the hulk told them, calmly.
They waited.
Ticker found a new understanding of the stringent security regulations. Hitherto, he had taken it for granted that their purpose was to preserve the lead. Clearly, once it should be known that any nation had a space-station under construction, those who had it only in the drawing-board stage would press on, and the pace would grow warmer. The best way to avoid that was secrecy, and if necessary to show astonishment that any such device was being seriously contemplated. That had seemed reason
able; there was nothing to be gained by creating a situation where construction would have to be rushed, and possibly a lot might be lost by it. The thought of an attack on the station before it was even finished had never occurred to him.
But if this were indeed a missile, and if it should get the hulk, nobody would survive. And if the Department were to be stung into denouncing the aggression? Well, the Other Fellows would just shrug and deny. ‘What, us! Why, we never even knew it existed. Obviously an accident,’ they would say. ‘An accident which has now been followed by a vicious and despicable slander in an effort to cover up those responsible.’
‘Three minutes,’ said the Commander.
Ticker took his eyes from the ‘craft/missile’ and looked about him. His gaze loitered on the moon, a clear, sharp coin, recently risen from behind the blue pearl of Earth. Scarred but serene, it hung on the sky; a silver medal, still waiting to be won. The next leap.
First there had been this little hop of ten thousand miles to make a stepping-stone for the leap of two hundred and twenty-four thousand miles, more or less - and then, not in his time, but some day, there would be still greater leaps beyond. For him, for now, the moon would be enough.
‘The moon,’ murmured Ticker. ‘ “The moon on the one hand, the dawn on the other: the moon is my sister, the dawn is my brother.” ‘
Suddenly he was swept with a shaking anger. A fury against stupidity and littleness, against narrow, scheming minds that were ready to wreck the greatest adventure of all, as a political move. What would happen now if their work were destroyed? The cost had been in proportion to the ambition. If all this were lost, would the government be willing, could they even afford, to make a new allocation and start again? Might it not be that, with such an example, all the rival nations would content themselves with arrangements to blow any other attempted space-stations out of existence? Would that be the end of the great adventure - to be kept earthbound by stalemate and futility...?