Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke (141 page)

‘I’ll go out and get it,’ I answered, snapping an elastic band over my papers so that the air currents from the ventilators wouldn’t set them wandering around the room. Though I tried to sound as if I was doing everyone a great favour, I was secretly not at all displeased. It had been at least two weeks since I’d been outside; I was getting a little tired of stores schedules, maintenance reports, and all the glamorous ingredients of a Space Station Supervisor’s life.

The only member of the staff I passed on my way to the air lock was Tommy, our recently acquired cat. Pets mean a great deal to men thousands of miles from Earth, but there are not many animals that can adapt themselves to a weightless environment. Tommy mewed plaintively at me as I clambered into my spacesuit, but I was in too much of a hurry to play with him.

At this point, perhaps I should remind you that the suits we use on the station are completely different from the flexible affairs men wear when they want to walk around on the moon. Ours are really baby spaceships, just big enough to hold one man. They are stubby cylinders, about seven feet long, fitted with low-powered propulsion jets, and have a pair of accordion-like sleeves at the upper end for the operator’s arms. Normally, however, you keep your hands drawn inside the suit, working the manual controls in front of your chest.

As soon as I’d settled down inside my very exclusive space-craft, I switched on power and checked the gauges on the tiny instrument panel. There’s a magic word, ‘FORB’, that you’ll often hear spacemen mutter as they climb into their suits; it reminds them to test fuel, oxygen, radio, batteries. All my needles were well in the safety zone, so I lowered the transparent hemisphere over my head and sealed myself in. For a short trip like this, I did not bother to check the suit’s internal lockers, which were used to carry food and special equipment for extended missions.

As the conveyor belt decanted me into the air lock, I felt like an Indian papoose being carried along on its mother’s back. Then the pumps brought the pressure down to zero, the outer door opened, and the last traces of air swept me out into the stars, turning very slowly head over heels.

The station was only a dozen feet away, yet I was now an independent planet – a little world of my own. I was sealed up in a tiny, mobile cylinder, with a superb view of the entire universe, but I had practically no freedom of movement inside the suit. The padded seat and safety belts prevented me from turning around, though I could reach all the controls and lockers with my hands or feet.

In space, the great enemy is the sun, which can blast you to blindness in seconds. Very cautiously, I opened up the dark filters on the ‘night’ side of my suit, and I turned my head to look out at the stars. At the same time I switched the helmet’s external sunshade to automatic, so that whichever way the suit gyrated my eyes would be shielded from that intolerable glare.

Presently, I found my target – a bright fleck of silver whose metallic glint distinguished it clearly from the surrounding stars. I stamped on the jet-control pedal, and felt the mild surge of acceleration as the low-powered rockets set me moving away from the station. After ten seconds of steady thrust, I estimated that my speed was great enough, and cut off the drive. It would take me five minutes to coast the rest of the way, and not much longer to return with my salvage.

And it was at that moment, as I launched myself out into the abyss, that I knew that something was horribly wrong.

It is never completely silent inside a spacesuit; you can always hear the gentle hiss of oxygen, the faint whirr of fans and motors, the susurration of your own breathing – even, if you listen carefully enough, the rhythmic thump that is the pounding of your heart. These sounds reverberate through the suit, unable to escape into the surrounding void; they are the unnoticed background of life in space, for you are aware of them only when they change.

They had changed now; to them had been added a sound which I could not identify. It was an intermittent, muffled thudding, sometimes accompanied by a scraping noise, as of metal upon metal.

I froze instantly, holding my breath and trying to locate the alien sound with my ears. The meters on the control board gave me no clues; all the needles were rock-steady on their scales, and there were none of the flickering red lights that would warn of impending disaster. That was some comfort, but not much. I had long ago learned to trust my instincts in such matters; their alarm signals were flashing now, telling me to return to the station before it was too late …

Even now, I do not like to recall those next few minutes, as panic slowly flooded into my mind like a rising tide, overwhelming the dams of reason and logic which every man must erect against the mystery of the universe. I knew then what it was like to face insanity; no other explanation fitted the facts.

For it was no longer possible to pretend that the noise disturbing me was that of some faulty mechanism. Though I was in utter isolation, far from any other human being or indeed any material object, I was not alone. The soundless void was bringing to my ears the faint but unmistakable stirrings of life.

In that first, heart-freezing moment it seemed that something was trying to get into my suit – something invisible, seeking shelter from the cruel and pitiless vacuum of space. I whirled madly in my harness, scanning the entire sphere of vision around me except for the blazing, forbidden cone toward the sun. There was nothing there, of course. There could not be – yet that purposeful scrabbling was clearer than ever.

Despite the nonsense that has been written about us, it is not true that spacemen are superstitious. But can you blame me if, as I came to the end of logic’s resources, I suddenly remembered how Bernie Summers had died, no farther from the station than I was at this very moment?

It was one of those ‘impossible’ accidents; it always is. Three things had gone wrong at once. Bernie’s oxygen regulator had run wild and sent the pressure soaring, the safety valve had failed to blow – and a faulty joint had given way instead. In a fraction of a second, his suit was open to space.

I had never known Bernie, but suddenly his fate became of overwhelming importance to me – for a horrible idea had come into my mind. One does not talk about these things, but a damaged spacesuit is too valuable to be thrown away, even if it has killed its wearer. It is repaired, renumbered – and issued to someone else …

What happens to the soul of a man who dies between the stars, far from his native world? Are you still here, Bernie, clinging to the last object that linked you to your lost and distant home?

As I fought the nightmares that were swirling around me – for now it seemed that the scratchings and soft fumblings were coming from all directions – there was one last hope to which I clung. For the sake of my sanity, I had to prove that this wasn’t Bernie’s suit – that the metal walls so closely wrapped around me had never been another man’s coffin.

It took me several tries before I could press the right button and switch my transmitter to the emergency wave length. ‘Station!’ I gasped. ‘I’m in trouble! Get records to check my suit history and—’

I never finished; they say my yell wrecked the microphone. But what man alone in the absolute isolation of a spacesuit would
not
have yelled when something patted him softly on the back of the neck?

I must have lunged forward, despite the safety harness, and smashed against the upper edge of the control panel. When the rescue squad reached me a few minutes later, I was still unconscious, with an angry bruise across my forehead.

And so I was the last person in the whole satellite relay system to know what had happened. When I came to my senses an hour later, all our medical staff was gathered around my bed, but it was quite a while before the doctors bothered to look at me. They were much too busy playing with the three cute little kittens our badly misnamed Tommy had been rearing in the seclusion of my spacesuit’s Number Five Storage Locker.

Out Of The Cradle, Endlessly
Orbiting …

First published in
Dude
, March 1959

Collected in
Tales of Ten Worlds

Before we start, I’d like to point out something that a good many people seem to have overlooked. The twenty-first century does
not
begin tomorrow; it begins a year later, on January 1, 2001. Even though the calendar reads 2000 from midnight, the old century still has twelve months to run. Every hundred years we astronomers have to explain this all over again, but it makes no difference. The celebrations start just as soon as the two zeros go up …

So you want to know my most memorable moment in fifty years of space exploration … I suppose you’ve already interviewed von Braun? How is he? Good; I’ve not seen him since that symposium we arranged in Astrograd on his eightieth birthday, the last time he came down from the Moon.

Yes – I’ve been present at some of the biggest moments in the history of space flight, right back to the launching of the first satellite. I was only twenty-five then, and a very junior mathematician at Kapustin Yar – not important enough to be in the control centre during the countdown. But I heard the take-off: it was the second most awe-inspiring sound I’ve heard in my entire life. (The first? I’ll come to that later.) When we knew we’d hit orbit, one of the senior scientists called for his Zis, and we drove into Stalingrad for a real party. Only the very top people had cars in the Workers’ Paradise, you know; we made the hundred-kilometre drive in just about the same time the Sputnik took for one circuit of Earth, and
that
was pretty good going. Someone calculated that the amount of vodka consumed the next day could have launched the satellite the Americans were building, but I don’t think that was quite true.

Most of the history books say that the Space Age began then, on October 4, 1957; I’m not going to argue with them, but I think the really exciting times came later. For sheer drama you can’t beat the US Navy’s race to fish Dimitri Kalinin out of the South Atlantic before his capsule sank. Then there was Jerry Wingate’s radio commentary, with all the adjectives which no network dared to censor, as he rounded the Moon and became the first man to see its hidden face. And, of course, only five years later, that TV broadcast from the cabin of the
Hermann Oberth
as she touched down on the plateau in the Bay of Rainbows, where she still stands, an eternal monument to the men buried beside her.

Those were the great landmarks on the road to space, but you’re wrong if you think I’m going to talk about them; for what made the greatest impact on me was something very, very different. I’m not even sure if I can share the experience, and if I succeed you won’t be able to make a story out of it. Not a new one, anyway, for the papers were full of it at the time. But most of them missed the point completely; to them it was just good human-interest material, nothing more.

The time was twenty years after the launching of Sputnik I, and by then, with a good many other people, I was on the Moon … and too important, alas, to be a real scientist any more. It had been a dozen years since I’d programmed an electronic computer; now I had the slightly more difficult task of programming human beings, since I was Chief Co-ordinator of Project Ares, the first manned expedition to Mars.

We were starting from the Moon, of course, because of the low gravity; it’s about fifty times easier, in terms of fuel, to take off from there than from the Earth. We’d thought of constructing the ships in a satellite orbit, which would have cut fuel requirements even further, but when we looked into it, the idea wasn’t as good as it seemed. It’s not easy to set up factories and machine shops in space; the absence of gravity is a nuisance rather than an advantage when you want things to stay put. By that time, at the end of the seventies, the First Lunar Base was getting well organised, with chemical processing plants and all kinds of small-scale industrial operations to turn out the things the colony needed. So we decided to use the existing facilities rather than set up new ones, at great difficulty and expense, out in space.

Alpha, Beta
, and
Gamma
, the three ships of the expedition, were being built inside the ramparts of Plato, perhaps the most perfect of all the walled plains on this side of the Moon. It’s so large that if you stand in the middle you could never guess that you were inside a crater; the ring of mountains around you is hidden far below the horizon. The pressure domes of the base were about ten kilometres from the launching site, connected to it by one of those overhead cable systems that the tourists love to ride on, but which have ruined so much of the lunar scenery.

It was a rugged sort of life, in those pioneering days, for we had none of the luxuries everyone now takes for granted. Central Dome, with its parks and lakes, was still a dream on the architects’ drawing boards; even if it had existed, we would have been too busy to enjoy it, for Project Ares devoured all our waking moments. It would be Man’s first great leap into space; by that time we already looked on the Moon as no more than a suburb of Earth, a steppingstone on the way to places that really mattered. Our beliefs were neatly expressed by that famous remark of Tsiolkovsky’s, which I’d hung up for everyone to see as they entered my office:

EARTH IS THE CRADLE OF THE MIND – BUT