From the Ocean from teh Stars (37 page)

only Texan to have the Order of the Garter. Won't that be nice for you?"

"Shush!" said Chambers. The prince was speaking, his words wing
ing back across the abyss that now sundered him from the island he
would one day rule.

"I am sorry, Mr. Prime Minister," he said, "if I've caused you any
alarm. I will return as soon as it is convenient. Someone has to do everything for the first time, and I felt the moment had come for a member of my family to leave Earth. It will be a valuable part of my education, and
will make me more fitted to carry out my duty. Good-by."

He dropped the microphone and walked over to the observation win
dow—the only spaceward-looking port on the entire ship. Saunders
watched him standing there, proud and lonely—but contented now. And
as he saw the prince staring out at the stars which he had at last attained,
all his annoyance and indignation slowly evaporated.

No one spoke for a long time. Then Prince Henry tore his gaze away from the blinding splendor beyond the port, looked at Captain Saunders,
and smiled.

"Where's the galley, Captain?" he asked. "I may be out of practice,
but when I used to go scouting I was the best cook in my patrol."

Saunders slowly relaxed, then smiled back. The tension seemed to lift from the control room. Mars was still a long way off, but he knew
now that this wasn't going to be such a bad trip after all. . . .

☆
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SKY

SPECIAL DELIVERY

1 can still remember the excitement, back in 1957,
when Russia launched the first artificial satellites and managed to hang a
few pounds of instruments up here above the atmosphere. Of course, I
was only a kid at the time, but I went out in the evening like everyone
else, trying to spot those litde magnesium spheres as they zipped through
the twilight sky hundreds of miles above my head. It's strange to think
that some of them are still there—but that now they're
below
me, and I'd
have to look down toward Earth if I wanted to see them. . . .

Yes, a lot has happened in the last forty years, and sometimes I'm
afraid that you people down on Earth take the space stations for granted,
forgetting the skill and science and courage that went to make them. How
often do you stop to think that all your long-distance phone calls, and
most of your TV programs, are routed through one or the other of the
satellites? And how often do you give any credit to the meteorologists up
here for the fact that weather forecasts are no longer the joke they were
to our grandfathers, but are dead accurate ninety-nine per cent of the
time?

It was a rugged life, back in the seventies, when I went up to work on
the outer stations. They were being rushed into operation to open up the millions of new TV and radio circuits which would be available as soon
as we had transmitters out in space that could beam programs to any
where on the globe.

The first artificial satellites had been very close to Earth, but the
three stations forming the great triangle of the Relay Chain had to be
twenty-two thousand miles up, spaced equally around the equator. At this altitude—and at no other—they would take exactly a day to go
around their orbit, and so would stay poised forever over the same spot
on the turning Earth.

In my time I've worked on all three of the stations, but my first tour

of duty was aboard Relay Two. That's almost exactly over Entebbe,
Uganda, and provides service for Europe, Africa, and most of Asia. To
day it's a huge structure hundreds of yards across, beaming thousands of
simultaneous programs down to the hemisphere beneath it as it carries
the radio traffic of half the world. But when I saw it for the first time
from the port of the ferry rocket that carried me up to orbit, it looked like
a junk pile adrift in space. Prefabricated parts were floating around in hopeless confusion, and it seemed impossible that any order could ever
emerge from this chaos.

Accommodation for the technical staff and assembling crews was
primitive, consisting of a few unserviceable ferry rockets that had been
stripped of everything except air purifiers. "The Hulks," we christened
them; each man had just enough room for himself and a couple of cubic
feet of personal belongings. There was a fine irony in the fact that we
were living in the midst of infinite space—and hadn't room to swing a
cat.

It was a great day when we heard that the first pressurized living
quarters were on their way up to us—complete with needle-jet shower
baths that would operate even here, where water—like everything else—
had no weight. Unless you've lived aboard an overcrowded spaceship,
you won't appreciate what that meant. We could throw away our damp
sponges and feel really clean at last. . . .

Nor were the showers the only luxury promised us. On the way up from Earth was an inflatable lounge spacious enough to hold no fewer
than eight people, a microfilm library, a magnetic billiard table, light
weight chess sets, and similar novelties for bored spacemen. The very
thought of all these comforts made our cramped life in the Hulks seem quite unendurable, even though we were being paid about a thousand
dollars a week to endure it.

Starting from the Second Refueling Zone, two thousand miles above
Earth, the eagerly awaited ferry rocket would take about six hours to
climb up to us with its precious cargo. I was off duty at the time, and
stationed myself at the telescope where I'd spent most of my scanty lei
sure. It was impossible to grow tired of exploring the great world hanging
there in space beside us; with the highest power of the telescope, one
seemed to be only a few miles above the surface. When there were no
clouds and the seeing was good, objects the size of a small house were
easily visible. I had never been to Africa, but I grew to know it well while
I was off duty in Station Two. You may not believe this, but I've often
spotted elephants moving across the plains, and the immense herds of

zebras and antelopes were easy to see as they flowed back and forth like
living tides on the great reservations.

But my favorite spectacle was the dawn coming up over the moun
tains in the heart of the continent. The line of sunlight would come
sweeping across the Indian Ocean, and the new day would extinguish the
tiny, twinkling galaxies of the cities shining in the darkness below me.
Long before the sun had reached the lowlands around them, the peaks of
Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya would be blazing in the dawn, brilliant
stars still surrounded by the night. As the sun rose higher, the day would
march swiftly down their slopes and the valleys would fill with light.
Earth would then be at its first quarter, waxing toward full.

Twelve hours later, I would see the reverse process as the same
mountains caught the last rays of the setting sun. They would blaze for
a little while in the narrow belt of twilight; then Earth would spin into
darkness, and night would fall upon Africa.

It was not the beauty of the terrestrial globe I was concerned with
now. Indeed, I was not even looking at Earth, but at the fierce blue-white
star high above the western edge of the planet's disk. The automatic
freighter was eclipsed in Earth's shadow; what I was seeing was the
incandescent flare of its rockets as they drove it up on its twenty-thousand-
mile climb.

I had watched ships ascending to us so often that I knew every stage of
their maneuver by heart. So when the rockets didn't wink out, but contin
ued to burn steadily, I knew within seconds that something was wrong.
In sick, helpless fury I watched all our longed-for comforts—and, worse still, our mail!—moving faster and faster along the unintended orbit. The
freighter's autopilot had jammed; had there been a human pilot aboard,
he could have overridden the controls and cut the motor, but now all the
fuel that should have driven the ferry on its two-way trip was being
burned in one continuous blast of power.

By the time the fuel tanks had emptied, and that distant star had
flickered and died in the field of my telescope, the tracking stations had
confirmed what I already knew. The freighter was moving far too fast
for Earth's gravity to recapture it—indeed, it was heading into the cosmic
wilderness beyond Pluto. . . .

It took a long time for morale to recover, and it only made matters
worse when someone in the computing section worked out the future his
tory of our errant freighter. You see, nothing is ever really lost in space. Once you've calculated its orbit, you know where it is until the end of
eternity. As we watched our lounge, our library, our games, our mail

receding to the far horizons of the solar system, we knew that it would
all come back one day, in perfect condition. If we have a ship standing
by it will be easy to intercept it the second time it comes around the sun—quite early in the spring of the year
a.d.
15,862.

FEATHERED FRIEND

T
o the best of my knowledge, there's never been a regulation that forbids one to keep pets in a space station. No one ever
thought it was necessary—and even had such a rule existed, I am quite
certain that Sven Olsen would have ignored it.

With a name like that, you will picture Sven at once as a six-foot-six
Nordic giant, built like a bull and with a voice to match. Had this been so,
his chances of getting a job in space would have been very slim; actually
he was a wiry little fellow, like most of the early spacers, and managed
to qualify easily for the 150-pound bonus that kept so many of us on a
reducing diet.

Sven was one of our best construction men, and excelled at the tricky
and specialized work of collecting assorted girders as they floated around
in free fall, making them do the slow-motion, three-dimensional ballet
that would get them into their right positions, and fusing the pieces together when they were precisely dovetailed into the intended pattern. I
never tired of watching him and his gang as the station grew under their
hands like a giant jigsaw puzzle; it was a skilled and difficult job, for a
space suit is not the most convenient of garbs in which to work. However,
Sven's team had one great advantage over the construction gangs you
see putting up skyscrapers down on Earth. They could step back and ad
mire their handiwork without being abruptly parted from it by gravity. . . .

Don't ask me why Sven wanted a pet, or why he chose the one he
did. I'm not a psychologist, but I must admit that his selection was very
sensible. Claribel weighed practically nothing, her food requirements
were infinitesimal—and she was not worried, as most animals would have
been, by the absence of gravity.

I first became aware that Claribel was aboard when I was sitting in
the little cubbyhole laughingly called my office, checking through my lists of technical stores to decide what items we'd be running out of next. When
I heard the musical whistle beside my ear, I assumed that it had come over the station intercom, and waited for an announcement to follow. It

didn't; instead, there was a long and involved pattern of melody that
made me look up with such a start that I forgot all about the angle beam
just behind my head. When the stars had ceased to explode before my
eyes, I had my first view of Claribel.

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 un
necessary 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 unauthorized 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.