Murray Leinster

“ He saw Mercury off to its right. It was the first time in his life that he'd ever seen that planet, and he'd had to get out of the atmosphere to do it. Not one person in ten thousand has ever seen the sun's closest satellite, even as a tiny speck of light in the sky. But McCauley saw it, not hidden by the daytime sky. There was no air here to speak of. At this height a man not in a pressure-tight cabin, trying to breathe what few molecules of air were present, would die in thirteen seconds because of anoxia and explosive decompression. He'd die no more quickly out between the galaxies. ”

“ Somehow, in the illimitable emptiness of which the fiftieth part had never been seen by men, somehow, under the black, star-studded sky with the setting sun casting mile-long shadows of utter blackness and absolute cold, McCauley knew that they would have some sort of fight in which one must die.
But they were Space Service officers. Before they had that fight they would set up the relay that would give Farside Base a connection to Grimaldi, and so to Earth, and so by Earth Relay to every other human being on the moon. They would do their duty as Space Service officers before they did murder. ”

“ Man had circled the earth in capsules, but not yet had any man lifted his own rocketship from Earth and set himself in orbit. Still less had any man risen into space as the captain of his ship and brought it back to earth. Until such a thing was done, it would be absurd to speak of spaceships. Missiles, yes. Satellites, yes. But a ship had to take off and land on its own before men could say there is such a thing as a spaceship. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In space, men have to trust each other and be worthy of trust in return. There is no room in unlimited emptiness for a man who arouses suspicion and antagonism among his shipmates solely for his own amusement. But Fallon had done just that. He was as dangerous as an atom bomb on the expedition to Mars. But whereas an atom bomb can be disarmed, nobody can disarm a man who chooses to play the fool.
Fallon picked up the objects McCauley had given him. ”

“ Furness did not answer. There was no sensation of weight, of course. Nothing weighed anything. Nothing could be considered light or heavy. The difference between a copper penny and the ship itself was purely imaginary. They had different masses, but both would weigh the same—zero. McCauley suddenly turned off the silent air-circulator in the cabin. He struck a match. The flame flared, but not as a rising leaf shape. It was a perfect ball of incandescence. But it did not continue to burn. It went out, and there was a ball of white smokiness where the flame had been. ”

“ In eight minutes more, however, the sun had rolled up over the edge of the world and below the ship there was ocean. Away off to the left McCauley could see spiral arms of cloud, signifying a cyclonic disturbance moving north across the Coral Sea. Sturdy steamships fought for their lives in that typhoon, and many human beings would die in it. The ship sped on, and there came into the headphones of both McCauley and Furness a beamed message from the naval installation at Guam, which dimly and fugitively could be sighted under an aggregation of white clouds more dense than ordinary. ”

“ Keep him away from me so he can't pick a quarrel and insist that I be fired. Make yourself the one he'll insist he can't stand, when what he can't stand is the trip."
Randy grimaced again.
"You're a rat," he said resignedly. "But suppose I charm him so he doesn't insist that I be thrown out?"
"Fine!" said McCauley. "There'll be a crew of only two, with him as the third. I'd rather have you than anybody else. But Bramwell's devising excuses for refusing to go. You could be one excuse." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Fear is an emergency mechanism to increase the pulse rate and release adrenalin and tone the muscles for combat or flight. It is inherently a limited response. It has a maximum duration.
And Bramwell was now past the limit of the time a man can stay hysterically terrified. He didn't like space. He didn't like no-weight. But most devastatingly and bitterly—now that he was no longer terrified—he was ashamed. McCauley and Randy had seen him in babbling, incoherent frenzy. ”

“ There was a logy wallowing when it penetrated the bottom of the jetstream. But it kept on, and presently a clock assured McCauley that he'd been in the stream long enough to gain all the extra speed it could give him. He aimed the ship's nose still higher and gave the ramjets every particle of fuel they could consume.
The sky grew dark. Dark purple. Faint twinklings appeared here and there. They were the stars, visible in daylight. The ramjets' tumult was still thinner now. And little by little the rate of climb grew less. ”

“ The sun was in the act of descending, to be eclipsed by the edge of Earth, and its light came through hundreds of miles of thick air which turned it from a burning golden glare to flame-red, and then crimson, and then ruby-red as he stared. ”

“ The third stage, which was the Venus ship, went whipping on out into space. It circled Earth once, gradually overtaking the Space Platform as it floated serenely in emptiness three thousand miles out from the Earth's surface. With tiny, finicky jettings of rocket fuel, and the use of steam-jets for final maneuvering, McCauley brought the Venus ship into contact with the Space Platform.
There was swift and efficient action. Men in space suits swarmed out of the brilliantly sunlit, faceted artificial moon. They connected fuel hoses and topped off the Venus ship's tanks. ”

“ In the pressurized cabin, Furness' voice was more nearly audible. But this was the first of two moments of truth. Here and now McCauley had to perform, as the act of a man, what highly complicated machines would later compute he should have done. He had to get the X-21 into a three-dimensional relationship to the gravitational field of Earth. He had to point the ship not only laterally but vertically in the exact direction that the exact timing of rocket thrust would convert into an orbit. An error of half a degree would immediately be fatal. ”

“ It had McCauley's own speed of rotation, so it did not go where he aimed. It took half a dozen attempts to get the rope to where the younger man could catch the squirming line in the stiff gauntlet of his space suit.
"Now, fasten your reamer to the rope," commanded McCauley. "Tie on your other tools. Give me every bit of equipment you've got except your air tanks."
"Y-yes, sir," said Sammy's voice in the helmet phones.
Spinning as they were, the universe of stars and sun and the vast, unfamiliar, brilliantly lighted object which was Earth seemed to be engaged in a monstrous saraband. ”

“ When Ed McCauley was a very young officer—in fact a new-made first lieutenant, space travel was only for robots. Nobody'd ever ridden out of the atmosphere in a rocket, and nobody'd ever piloted a ship into orbital flight and landed it again; there wasn't a Space Platform, and the moon bases hadn't been built. There was constant danger from cosmic rays and flare particles, and nobody dreamed of trying to reach either Venus or Mars. ”

“ The thing that disturbed him most, however—the thing that made him extremely conscientious and extremely self-controlled—was the consequences of not facing things and of trying to cover up his own shortcomings. When he got over his hysterics he wanted to get even with McCauley and Randy by defying them. But he hadn't dared defy them openly. He'd been peevish and ashamed and humiliated. To him the bronx cheer of the oxygen flutter valve had seemed a mockery. But he still felt superior to pieces of machinery. ”

“ Holmes was also an able young officer, who'd been a submariner before he transferred to the equally confining Space Service. They'd known each other back on Earth and somehow—nobody knew how—a bitter and inveterate enmity had sprung up between them. Perhaps a girl was at the root of it, but if so, neither of them won her. Perhaps, by this time, the initial cause of their hatred had nearly or completely ceased to matter. Enmity does not often last unless things occur that can feed and strengthen it. It is normal for two young men to quarrel furiously and be ready to kill each other. ”

“ You're appointed to be the man who'll be fired if Bramwell demands it."
Randy blinked. The cramped, inconvenient, gadget-filled interior of the Venus ship looked glamorous, when you thought of where it was going and what had to be done in it.
"The fact is," said McCauley, "—and the big brass knows it—the fact is that Bramwell's scared. He's terrified at the idea of going out into space. But he's ashamed to admit it. He'd rather die than let anyone know he's in a panic. He's probably trying to keep from admitting it even to himself. So he's making trouble to delay the moment of truth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That would be the night line on Earth. The Platform and its company moved separately yet together toward that darkness. Presently it would cover half the disk of Earth, and then it would sweep on until only a swiftly thinning crescent of light remained, and then the Platform would plunge into utter darkness, where most of the cosmos was only shining stars and a pallid moon, the rest the blackness of the Pit. And of course, in this darkness the building satellite's unprotected substance would—like McCauley—drop to a temperature of two hundred and twenty-odd degrees below zero. ”

“ Neither Holmes nor Kent had a mark against him except in connection with the other man. Yet no commanding officer—certainly none on the moon—would want either man in his base after having read the records. The moon is too small for men who carry their enmities with them into space.
And McCauley had both men—able men, capable men, desirable men except for their mutual hatred. He'd traveled a quarter way around the moon to have one or both of them transferred out of Grimaldi Base before they could arrange another covered-up duel which would leave one dead and the other a murderer. ”

“ One man would go on ahead of the sledge and one would follow. It was hard to believe that the second man would not notice the loss of an air tank. Air tanks were life. True, a sledge party always had more air than was needed for any expected journey—a good margin for emergency—but this tank could cut the margin for this journey seriously.
McCauley growled to himself. He knew the calculations for placing the relay. The mountain beyond the horizon was an eight-hour journey by sledge—the horizon on the moon is only two miles away instead of eight. ”