Part 6

Steam-jets spouted at the ends of the X-21's rear fins. In emptiness, the ship spun halfway about until the swiftly moving solidity below ceased to move toward the pointed nose. It fled away. The ship traveled backward where there was no air.

"And here we go," said McCauley.

The rocket timer was set. He pressed the blast button. A second later he came out of near-unconsciousness and set it again. There was another rocket blast. He almost recovered from the effect of it before he set the timer for a third.

Doggedly he set the timer and pressed the button, and allowed himself three full breaths and set it and pressed again. The shocks seemed to become more and more violent and intolerable. They were. With loss of mass, the acceleration of the lightened ship went up to twenty-two gees. He cut the blasts to three-quarters of a second. A rocket cannot be throttled down. It fires full blast or it has no appreciable effect at all.

* * * * *

Quartermain Base was built on a flat, flat plain that extended miles in every direction. Its buildings, from a reasonable distance, were only toy structures, tiny angular objects in the middle of vastness. Overhead there was a sky of absolute blue. It was empty. Below, there was flatness to the horizon. It contained nothing. There was no motion of any sort anywhere. The base lay still and silent under the baking two-o'clock sun. Nothing happened. Nothing....

No. Something was happening. Specks moved out of the miniature buildings. Dots rolled out of the infinitesimal garages. The dots and the specks seemed to mill about uncertainly and then to come to a restless, not-quite stillness. It seemed that something was expected to happen. But there was nothing that could. There was only a great emptiness and a great stillness....

But then there came a faint roaring. It was very faint indeed. It strengthened, and diminished, and strengthened again.

Then a mote appeared in the sky. It came down and down and down, bellowing. The bellowing was the unmistakable sound of ramjets. And the thinnest of high-pitched sounds arose from the specks which were men outside the buildings at the base. The sounds were howls of triumph, shrieks of rejoicing, of gladness that the impossible had been accomplished.

The X-21 came wabbling down out of the sky and leveled off a bare hundred feet above the pebbly plain. It lowered, and lowered, and suddenly yellow dust spouted furiously where its wheels had touched. The roaring cut off. The ship rolled and rolled. Later, it would develop that less than one quart of ramjet fuel remained to be burned before it hit ground.

Shouting, swarming men rushed toward it. Dots which were trucks and cars raced to greet it.

Presently McCauley saluted very formally, standing before a general whose cap was badly ripped on one side.

"Sir," he said, "it looks like we did it. And I'd like to say, sir, that I am very proud to have had Major Furness with me. He's hurt, sir, as I radioed to Hawaii. The ambulance is rushing him to hospital. But he stuck to his job throughout, sir, and I'll be obliged if you'll tell his son that he should be very proud of his father."

_3_

(Time passed after Ed McCauley became Major Ed McCauley, and most people forgot him. If his name was mentioned, someone might say vaguely: "McCauley ... McCauley? It seems to me I've heard the name." This was because remarkable events don't stay remarkable as time goes past. There was a two-hundred-pound satellite circling the moon these days, industriously sending back not only pictures of the moon's far side, but pictures of cloud masses on Earth which told much more about Earth's weather than had been known before. A drone missile had gone out to Mars, and its instruments suggested that men had better not come out just yet, and other drones had gone past Venus and said definitely that men better not come out just yet. So something had to be done to make those journeys possible. Men had to work in space, testing this and trying that, staying days or weeks at a time when solar flare-particles were not too much in evidence. This meant that there had to be a place for them to live and work. There were plenty of men who'd done spectacular things lately, but this needed somebody who would be worrying not about fame, but about getting a job done right. So Major McCauley received certain orders.)

On as much of the Space Platform as existed so far, a working day lasted an hour and forty minutes. There wasn't much of the Platform, as yet. The greatest bulk was a squat, clumsy metal object which had come up from Earth, pouring out rocket flames, to be the Platform's nucleus. From it now sprouted spidery, flimsy metal girders which reached out in apparent aimlessness. They formed an incomplete skeleton of joined triangles whose final form seemed indefinite. But in time they would form a most unlikely icosahedron traced in threads of silvery metal in emptiness. Although the Platform was barely begun, it grew noticeably as time went by, even though the working day was so brief.

Some people would have challenged the word "day." There was no true night where the first part of the Platform floated hurriedly in orbit some three thousand miles out from the planet Earth. There was light when the sun shone on it, which was two hours and five minutes out of three hours and seven. Despite Luna, Earth's ancient and untidy moon, there was abysmal darkness when the Platform plunged into Earth's shadow. This was not nightfall. When sunlight ended, cut off by Earth's eight-thousand-mile bulk of stone and metal, the phenomenon was an eclipse. Once in each revolution about the world which was building it, the Platform was eclipsed by Earth. When light returned, it was not sunrise, it was the ending of an eclipse.

McCauley was in charge of the Platform's construction crew, which consisted of himself--a major--and Randy Hall--a captain--and Sammy Breen, a second lieutenant in the Space Service. They lived after a fashion in the cabin of the ship that had brought them and a lot of building material up and out to the orbit the Platform was to follow. When a work period ended, they made their way painfully to that cabin. They made sure that they were inside it before the sun touched the outer limits of Earth's atmosphere and turned orange and deep-red and then disappeared, all within ten seconds. It was necessary, for in Earth's shadow the gossamer-like framework lost heat rapidly. Long before the end of the eclipse, the temperature of the bare metal dropped incredibly. Even with Earth nearby to temper it, it fell to something like two hundred and twenty-odd degrees below zero.

So between work periods there was darkness and unthinkable cold, and half the universe was brilliant stars--sometimes the moon was visible--and the other half looked like a hole in emptiness leading to nowhere. Actually, the seeming abyss was the night side of Earth, and sometimes Randy or young Lieutenant Breen used the telescope and found infinitesimal twinklings on it which could be calculated to be London, or New York, or Paris, or some other metropolis. But the night lights of cities on Earth were not remarkably bright, from three thousand miles out in the planet's shadow. Often, too, there were clouds thick enough to mask any man-made illumination. There was not much to see from the Platform in darkness and at an early stage of its construction.

But after the darkness there came light.

It was not dawn, of course. It began as a reddish-pinkish line which precisely outlined a half circle and formed a visible boundary between absolute blackness and the firmament of stars. The line thickened at its ends and then at its center. Instantly thereafter the sun peered--deep-red--around the edge of the planet Earth. It was a very lively sun. In seconds it reversed the color changes of its disappearance, fading from ruby to gold and then to the furnace-flame color it shows out of the atmosphere. And the crescent of lighted Earth grew broader and broader and suddenly seas and continents and oceans and islands seemed to come pouring out to cover the darkness, like creation happening as a flood.

Then, while the partially built Platform swept onward, without sound or sensation of movement, nothing else happened for a certain time. The three men inside the cabin waited for the metal to warm up from the temperature of liquid air. During full sunshine it went up to the temperature of low-pressure steam. When all the framework was warm enough so it was no longer brittle, the cabin air lock opened. McCauley came out in a silvery space suit. Captain Randy Hall followed him. Lieutenant Sammy Breen came last. McCauley surveyed the framework. Even a tiny meteorite could do damage, because any such object could be expected to hit at a velocity of seven to forty miles per second.

But when his inspection was over, McCauley slung a space rope around a girder, straddled the metal beam, and pulled himself effortlessly along to its first triangular junction with the other frame members. He had no weight. Nothing had any weight. One could not fall from the Platform, but one could very easily become lost from it. McCauley had acquired a certain fanatical concern about precautions against loss of contact with the only object within some three thousand miles which would let a man go on living.

When he reached the first junction of frame members, McCauley unlooped his space rope from behind the junction, looped it again beyond the joining place, and crawled over to straddle the next girder and slide along it with equal absence of effort until he arrived at the place where he'd left off work a little over an hour before. Randy Hall and Sammy Breen, meanwhile, emulated him, going in other directions. Within five minutes of coming out of the air lock they were perched at three separate places on the absurd framework.

With quite inadequate-looking cords they drew large metal beams toward them from their place beside the cabin. McCauley, for example, pulled at a thirty-foot girder with a piece of string. It stirred and shifted and floated to him. He stopped it, his knees holding him fast. Then--very clumsily because of its mass--he maneuvered it into place, slipped bolts through the ready-drilled holes, and tightened up the nuts. He finished his first girder. Randy completed his. Sammy Breen got his section in place, and then stopped.

"Major, sir," said his voice via space phone in McCauley's helmet phones, "there's something wrong here. A bolt doesn't go all the way through its hole. It won't force. The hole needs to be reamed out."

It was a trivial but annoying happening. The parts for the Space Platform had been cut out, shaped, and drilled on Earth. In theory they should fit perfectly together in space. But somebody had scamped on an inspection job and the result of his carelessness had to be repaired. It had to be done in a nondescript, crazy framework that was hurtling along in orbit at something over eleven thousand five hundred miles an hour. It shouldn't have happened.

"Memorize the part number for report," said McCauley, "and get the reamer and clear it."

"Yes, sir," said Breen.

McCauley pulled gently at a cord and a second girder stirred and floated gently toward him.

Below, the sunlit surface of Earth had an extraordinary appearance. It was some sixty-five degrees in diameter. At its edges the shapes of land and water--the planetary markings--were foreshortened and crowded together in an unparalleled fashion. A twelve-inch globe looked at from five inches away will give something of the same effect. From one side of the disk the markings moved toward the center, thickening and taking recognizable form as they neared the middle. Then they went on, distorted in a different fashion as they approached the opposite edge. When McCauley set his second beam in place a wildly twisted Isthmus of Panama appeared out of the misty whiteness which bordered Earth from where he floated. In half an hour it would be directly underneath and plainly recognizable. In another half hour it would be a new shape entirely. Then it would vanish. Only the center of the visible disk resembled any map-maker's representation, and that spot changed and changed and changed as the Space Platform hurtled past. At any given moment McCauley could see a ninth of all the planet's surface, but only a fraction of what he saw was familiar, and that changed continuously.

Sammy Breen slid along the Platform's frame to the cabin, the ship which had risen to this place from Earth, but would never return to Earth again. Arrived at the cabin, he seized a handrail, loosened his space rope, and pulled himself to the air lock. Immediately, of course, air would flow into the lock and he could emerge into the cabin's interior. He'd get the tool he needed for a job that should have been done on Earth. Then he'd come out again.

Randy tapped on the girder he'd just bolted into place. The vibrations passed through the metal and through McCauley's space suit to the air within it.

"I just happened to think," said Randy cheerfully, "that people down on Earth are all excited about this thing we're building. They think it's wonderful. And so it is, at the present moment. But I'm thinking that in a little while it won't be wonderful. It'll be old stuff. And the day'll come when it's a nuisance. There'll be complaints that it's in the way, barging around through space. It'll be in the way of ships taking tourists on week-end trips to Mars. They'll say it's a danger to astrogation. They'll say it should be cleared out of space. They'll insist that it be junked."

McCauley grunted. Randy was probably right. But just now McCauley held himself to a three-by-five-inch hollow metal beam, with a million million stars shining in all possible colors at the same time as the sun. He continued to work on, building the Platform that some day would be considered a nuisance. Three thousand miles away, geographical features squirmed and twisted themselves in their progress across the disk of Earth.

"But there'll come a time," said Randy cheerfully, "when one of my twenty-five-times-removed great-grand-sons will be spanked by his mother. He'll howl. It will be a very commonplace sort of happening. The only thing odd about it will be that it won't happen down on old Earth below us. It'll happen off somewhere on a planet that nobody's dreamed of yet, circling a sun that nobody's bothered to name, off yonder somewhere in the Milky Way."

McCauley grunted again.

"You haven't any kids yet, let alone great-great-grand-kids. You're not even married. Why the sentiment?"

Randy's voice came clearly in the helmet phones.

"I've been trying to think of a reason for me to be here," he explained, "playing with an oversized Erector set, instead of chasing some girl down on Earth. And I realized that this Platform, which will eventually be junked, has to be built before we can hope to colonize the nearer planets, let alone the stars. So now I know why I'm here. I'm doing this so my many-times-removed great-grandchildren can get their spankings all over the galaxy instead of only on the insignificant earth below. That's a noble purpose! I feel better."

"Good!" said McCauley, with irony.

He felt metallic clankings through the girder on which he was working. He turned his head within the space helmet. Sammy Breen had come out of the air lock, guiding himself by a handrail to a position astride a beam. He slid swiftly along its length. He came to a junction, flipped his space rope around to the far side of the joining place, swung over, and slid to the next junction like someone coasting down a stair rail. He was a cheerful young man, Sammy Breen.

"Sammy," said McCauley, "hold everything. I'll be over."

When people encounter each other only occasionally, there is no particular need for them to think intensively about each other's feelings. But three people isolated in an enforced intimacy much closer than that of cellmates have to take thought. When one of them is responsible for the other two, tact has to be practiced painstakingly. When one of the three is a young man who doesn't believe that anything can happen to him because nothing ever has, the situation calls for extreme care. McCauley had to use his brains if Randy and Sammy Breen were to be able to work with him under exacting conditions like these.

He unhooked his space rope, rehooked it past a junction, and pulled himself toward the place where Sammy Breen had come to a stop. It was, of course, at a place where two of the frame pieces of the Platform should join a third. They were to be bolted together and then another long section of framework would be added, which in turn would have yet another beam placed and bolted to it so the construction could continue. At the moment, however, a bolt hole needed to be reamed so the parts could be bolted together.

McCauley arrived at the corner of a triangle. When linked to all the others, this triangle would ultimately support the skin and hold the interior partitions of the Platform. Again he slipped his space rope over the junction, hooked it, followed it, and went on toward the place where Sammy Breen was. Sammy's voice came out of his helmet phones.

"I saw a man do this once in a circus," said Sammy. "I thought he was wonderful. But I can do it!"

McCauley looked up. Sammy Breen had his space rope hooked around the girder, to be sure. But now he floated, head toward Earth, with one finger barely touching the metal beam. A photograph would have shown him apparently supporting his whole weight on a single finger. But here there was no weight. Nothing drew Sammy toward either Earth or the Platform. But for his space rope, the lightest thrust of his finger would have sent him floating slowly, implacably, helplessly away from the spidery floating object, to drift alone through space forever.

"I hope you checked your rope before you came outside," McCauley said dryly.

"I did," said Sammy nonchalantly. "It's okay."

He tried to pull himself back to the girder with his fingers. He couldn't quite reach it. He was no more than half an inch from a fingertip hold that would have been more than enough, but he couldn't make it. He reached and reached, and his movements made his body in its space suit revolve ridiculously upside down and otherwise. Then he couldn't get his hand anywhere near the girder.

McCauley watched. He was unreasonably tense. But Sammy rather sheepishly gave a tug on his space rope and floated back to firm contact with the Platform.

"Not to be finicky about it," said McCauley, "that wasn't wise. There was only one chance in ten thousand that anything could happen, but there was no need to take it."

"Yes, sir," said Sammy Breen.

McCauley settled down, three feet from the end of the beam that was to be bolted to the one that needed reaming. Sammy Breen gripped that beam between his thighs and hauled the reamer to his hand. At work on the Platform, in emptiness, a man did not carry things, he towed them on cords. If he let go of any untethered object it might stay where he put it, in mid-space, but it was much more likely to have some small motion relative to his which would make it drift placidly out of reach forever.

Sammy Breen set the reamer in place in the bolt hole and pulled its trigger. It cut metal. But it dragged unreasonably at him, trying to turn him in the direction opposite its own rotation. Tiny chips and metal dust twinkled in the fierce sunshine. They floated away. They would never fall to Earth. Never. The reamer went through and Sammy cut off its power. He tried to pull it out. It stuck.

McCauley watched. He'd made a rule that nobody should do anything in the least out of routine without another man nearby. The three of them did not work together at one spot ordinarily. In the kind of conditions customary here, they'd be hopelessly in each other's way. But he'd issued the order requiring two to be together on any unusual job. Now, having obeyed his own rule that there must be a second man at hand when anything beyond simple bolting was to be done, tact made him keep silent while Sammy did it his own way. Too-close supervision and too-constant instruction can make for inefficiency. Worse, on a job like building the Platform, they can make for friction. McCauley watched without comment. He'd have done this thing differently. But it would be unwise to insist that it be done his way.

Sammy jerked at the reamer, which meant that he also jerked himself at it. He slid along the girder he gripped. McCauley said nothing. He'd criticized Sammy's horse-play a moment earlier. He did not want to make a second criticism now.

Sammy reached out--it would not be true to say that he stood up--and put his foot beside the reamer in the bolt hole. The position gave him leverage. He pulled violently. It was a wholly reasonable, completely natural, thoroughly matter-of-fact action. A man pulling something stuck in a hole braces himself exactly that way to get a strong pull at it. But this was on the Space Platform, where there is no weight.

The reamer gave. It came out abruptly. Sammy Breen shot away from the beam to the full length of his space rope--and the space rope slid off the end of the beam. He was headed for infinity with the reamer in his hand.

McCauley grabbed. He never knew how he managed to make so swift a motion in his clumsy space suit. But he hurled his body forward and snatched at the same instant. He caught the rope. But to reach it he'd had to lose his own leg-grip on the beam. The impetus of Sammy's leap jerked savagely at him. He squeezed his legs together in a frantic effort to hold fast by friction. He tried to turn his toes in to catch hold before he slid completely clear. But the feet of space suits do not pivot laterally so he could not turn them inward. Holding fast to Sammy's space rope, he was jerked inexorably clear and he and Sammy Breen floated away to emptiness together.

It was neither a rapid motion nor a simple one. The jerk had come at an angle rather than straight out. The two of them revolved slowly around each other at the two ends of the rope. McCauley held on grimly, braced for the countervailing tug of his own rope when it tightened.

It did tighten. And then it slid. The spot where Sammy had meant to bolt two girders together was, naturally, the point where the two frame members would complete a new triangle. It was to form one of the triangular facets of the twenty-sided figure the Platform would constitute when completed. But....

McCauley's rope slid, and caught, and slid again. Then it came free. Before it came free it had slowed the two of them, to be sure. It increased the rate of their spin. But it slid off to emptiness and the two of them went away from the Platform, revolving fairly rapidly about each other, held together by Sammy's space rope.

Their speed around each other was greater than the speed at which, as a pair, they were drifting serenely away. At one point in each rotation one of them approached the Platform while the other moved away from it. A second later the other spun toward the Platform and the first one moved toward emptiness. But together they drifted very, very deliberately toward the stars.

McCauley swore. Then he said curtly:

"Lieutenant!" The use of the term instead of the name was wise. Sammy Breen might be a horrified young man. But Lieutenant Breen was something else.

"Sir," said his voice unsteadily in McCauley's headphones, "I'm sorry, sir. I should have...."

"I'm going to throw you my space rope," snapped McCauley. "You will catch it and obey my orders."

"Yes, sir."

"Catch!" snapped McCauley.