Stephen Baxter - Anti-Ice

At half past seven each morning we would be awoken by the soft chiming of an alarm mechanism in the Great Eastern. Pocket would lift the small blinds from the portholes, ceding entry to twin beams of sun- and Earthlight, and we would take it in turns to slip into the concealed bathtub.

The toilet facilities were necessarily of a rather crude nature, consisting of an apparatus which unfolded from the padded wall and which could be surrounded by a light but airtight screen, so that privacy and cleanliness were to some degree maintained. As Traveller had assured us, the waste materials were vented directly into space.

It was even possible to shave on board the Phaeton! Having loose whiskers floating around the craft would hardly have been pleasant, of course, but, by using an excess of shaving soap, one could trap all but a few stray wisps quite cleanly. And any floating debris and dust was swept up by the invaluable Pocket. He used a flexible hose, attached through a socket in the wall to one of the air- circulation pumps. Daily Pocket scurried around the craft with this device, probing and scooping; at first Holden and I found the sight comical, but as the days wore on we grew to appreciate the value of the invention, for without it our hurtling prison would soon have become as squalid as a Calcutta den.

Traveller maintained a small wardrobe on board the ship, as did Pocket; Traveller loaned Holden and me undergarments and dressing-gowns, and the marvelous Pocket found ways to clean (using soaped sponges and cloths) the worst from our battered launch day finery.

And so it was that we three gentlemen—a little crumpled, perhaps, but more than presentable to polite company—would take our places in our table-seats at around eight-thirty, and allow Pocket to serve us with hot tea, bacon and buttered toast.

Traveller had extensive theories about the hazards of gravity-free living, among which he listed the wasting of unused muscles and bones, and he predicted that on our eventual return to Earth we might be left so weak we would require carrying from the vessel. And so while Pocket prepared lunch—usually a light, cold snack—we would don our dressing-gowns and take part in a vigorous exercise routine. This included shadow-boxing, a novel form of running which involved pacing around and around the walls of the Cabin rather as a mouse circles its treadmill, and occasionally a little good-humored wrestling.

Holden proved to be over-ample of girth, short of breath and generally unhealthy; Pocket was wasted and rather frail; and Traveller—though willing enough, vigorous and limber—was seven decades old and a mild asthmatic, a condition not aided by the wholesale destruction of his nose and sinuses in some ancient anti-ice accident. So it was I who would work on alone in our exercise bouts, the youngest and healthiest of us all.

The afternoons we would while away with games—the Phaeton bore several compendia of games such as chess and drafts, manufactured in a special miniaturized form for ease of storage; and we would also indulge in a few hands of bridge, with Traveller’s patent magnetized card decks. Holden was a willing player but rather unadventurous, while Sir Josiah proved imaginative but rash to a fault in his play! Poor Pocket, drafted in to make up the four, knew little more than the rules of the game; and after the first few rubbers the three of us discreetly drew lots to determine who would bear the misfortune of partnering the poor fellow.

Supper was the heaviest meal of the day, served around seven, usually with wine and followed by a globe or two of port with cigars; Pocket drew the blinds at this hour, excluding the unearthly heavens beyond the hull and allowing us the illusion of a comfortable sanctuary. It was quite pleasant to sit in companionable silence, lightly strapped to our wall-chairs, watching cigar smoke curl toward the hidden air filters.

The evening would close, more often than not, with a rendition by Traveller on his collapsible piano of a few hymns, or, more likely, of some of the rowdy variety-palace numbers of which he appeared to hold an encyclopedic knowledge. With the port settling inside us we would float at all angles around the engineer, his coat tails floating in the air as he played, bawling out ditties that would have made our mothers blush!

And so for the next several days our ship traveled on, a tiny bubble of warmth, air and English civilization, adrift on a river of celestial darkness.

Once the vertiginous fear generated by our state of continual falling was passed—and also, in poor Holden’s case, a severe physical sickness reminiscent of mal de mer —we found the sensation of continual drifting more than pleasant. The novelties of floating, the endless ingenuity of Traveller’s marvelous gadgets, and the sheer peculiarity of our position all combined to make our predicament at first fascinating and even enjoyable.

But the darker side of our situation was never far beneath the surface of my thoughts, and—as time wore on—the dangers and uncertainty confronting us emerged ever more clearly in my mind, as sand blows steadily away to reveal buried ruins.

My dreams centered on Françoise.

I passed idle hours envisioning the love which might one day blossom between us—and my dreams were so intense that sometimes it was as if I knew already that feeling of companionship, of relief that one is no longer alone, that comes from true love. And, even beyond that: as I meditated further, Françoise’s sweet and distant face became transformed in my mind into a symbol of the human world from which I had been torn.

Each morning I would watch eagerly as Pocket folded back the blinds, hoping beyond hope that somehow our situation might have changed during the night, that our flight might have been reversed by our unseen pilot (though Traveller impatiently explained more than once that were the engines engaged again we should hardly sleep through the experience). But each morning I was disappointed; each morning Earth shriveled a little more, demonstrating that we continued to recede from the planet of our birth by hundreds more miles every minute.

So we four strangers, thrown so suddenly into this aerial jail together, waited out the days. We were tolerant of each other—wary even. Holden and Traveller bore their plight with stoicism and fortitude, broken only by Traveller’s impatience to return to his various engineering projects on Earth. (Personally I found my work, and Spiers’s malevolent little face, easy to forget.) And Pocket—though the most vertigo-prone of us all—seemed as happy in his domestic routine as if he were on solid ground.

But as time went on without change, boredom, resentment and claustrophobic irritation grew within me like weeds; and on the fifth morning, as I sat in my chair facing Pocket’s bacon and toast breakfast and listening to Traveller and Holden discuss the vagaries of the Stock Exchange, something broke inside me.

I rose from my chair and dashed away my breakfast tray. “I can no longer listen to this!” I hovered in the air like some avenging angel, an effect spoilt only by fragments of orbiting toast.

Traveller looked up, a blob of marmalade perched comically on his platinum nose. “Good God, Wickers. Restrain yourself, sir.”

I felt my anger shine through the trembling of my voice. “Sir Josiah, for the hundredth and last time my name is Vicars, Edward Vicars; and as for restraint, I have had quite enough of that over the last several days.”

Holden said gloomily, “This will do no good, Ned.”

I turned on him. “Holden, we remain trapped in this ridiculous padded box which hurtles ever more deeply into the untracked void! And yet you sit and debate hypothetical stock movements—”