Мюррей Лейнстер - Space Tug

Joe nodded. He waited.

"Sanford," said Brent earnestly, "simply can't adjust to the discovery that he's no better than anybody else. That's all. He was a nice guy, but he's not used to frustration and he can't take it. Therefore he scorns everything that frustrates him—and everything else, by necessity. He'll be scornful about getting killed when it happens. But waiting for it is becoming intolerable to him."

He looked at his watch. He said apologetically, "I'm the crew psychologist. That's why I speak so firmly. In five minutes we're due to come out of the Earth's shadow into sunshine again. I'd suggest that you come to watch. It's good to look at."

He did not wait for an answer. He led the way. And the others followed in a strange procession. Somehow, automatically, they fell into single file, and they moved on their magnetic–soled slippers toward a passage tube in one wall. Their slipper soles clanked and clicked in an erratic rhythm. Brent walked with the mincing steps necessary for movement in weightlessness. The others imitated him. Their hands no longer hung naturally by their sides, but tended to make extravagant gestures with the slightest muscular impulse. They swayed extraordinarily as they walked. Brent was a slender figure, and Joe was more thick–set, and Haney was taller, and lean. The burly Chief and the forty–one inch figure of Mike the midget followed after them. They made a queer procession indeed.

Minutes later they were in a blister on the skin of the Platform. There were quartz glass ports in the sidewall. Outside the glass were metal shutters. Brent served out dense goggles, almost black, and touched the buttons that opened the steel port coverings.

They looked into space. The dimmer stars were extinguished by the goggles they wore. The brighter ones seemed faint and widely spaced. Beneath their feet as they held to handrails lay the featureless darkness of Earth. But before them and very far away there was a vast, dim arch of deepest red.

It was sunlight filtered through the thickest layers of Earth's air. It barely outlined the curve of that gigantic globe. As they stared, it grew brighter. The artificial satellite required little more than four hours for one revolution about its primary, the Earth. To those aboard it, the Earth would go through all its phases in no longer a time. They saw now the thinnest possible crescent of the new Earth. But in minutes—almost in seconds—the deep red sunshine brightened to gold. The hair–thin line of light widened to a narrow ribbon which described an eight–thousand–mile half–circle. It brightened markedly at the middle. It remained red at its ends, but in the very center it glowed with splendid flame. Then a golden ball appeared, and swam up and detached itself from the Earth, and the on–lookers saw the breath–taking spectacle of all of Earth's surface seemingly being born of the night.

As if new–created before their eyes, seas and lands unfolded in the sunlight. They watched flecks of cloud and the long shadows of mountains, and the strangely different colorings of its fields and forests.

As Brent had told them, it was good to watch.

It was half an hour later when they gathered in the kitchen of the Platform. The man who had been loading launching tubes now briskly worked to prepare a meal on the extremely unusual cooking–devices of a human outpost in interplanetary space.

The food smelled good. But Joe noticed that he could smell growing things. Green stuff. It was absurd—until he remembered that there was a hydroponic garden here. Plants grew in it under sunlamps which were turned on for a certain number of hours every day. The plants purified the Platform's air, and of course provided some fresh and nourishing food for the crew.

They ate. The food was served in plastic bowls, with elastic thread covers through which they could see and choose the particular morsels they fancied next. The threads stretched to let through the forks they ate with. But Brent used a rather more practical pair of tongs in a businesslike manner.

They drank coffee from cups which looked very much like ordinary cups on Earth. Joe remembered suddenly that Sally Holt had had much to do with the design of domestic science arrangements here. He regarded his cup with interest. It stayed in its saucer because of magnets in both plastic articles. The saucer stayed on the table because the table was magnetic, too. And the coffee did not float out to mid–air in a hot, round brownish ball, because there was a transparent cover over the cup. When one put his lips to the proper edge, a part of the cover yielded as the cup was squeezed. The far side of the cup was flexible. One pressed, and the coffee came into one's lips without the spilling of a drop.

At that moment Joe really thought of Sally for the first time in a good two hours. She'd been anxious that living in the Platform should be as normal and Earth–like as possible. The total absence of weight would be bad enough. She believed it needed to be countered, as a psychological factor in staying sane, by the effect of normal–seeming chairs and normal–tasting food, and not too exotic systems for eating.

Joe asked Brent about it.

"Oh, yes," said Brent mildly. "It's likely we'd all have gone off the deep end if there weren't some familiar things about. To have to drink from a cup that one squeezes is tolerable. But we'd have felt hysterical at times if we had to drink everything from the equivalent of baby bottles."

"Sally Holt," said Joe, "is a friend of mine. She helped design this stuff."

"That girl has every ounce of brains that any woman can be trusted with!" Brent said warmly. "She thought of things that would never have occurred to me! As a psychologist, I could see how good her ideas were when she brought them up, but as a male I'd never have dreamed of them." Then he grinned. "She fell down on just one point. So did everybody else. Nobody happened to think of a garbage–disposal system for the Platform."

It came into Joe's mind that garbage–disposal was hardly a subject one would expect to be discussing in interplanetary space. But the Platform wasn't the same thing as a spaceship. A ship could jettison refuse and leave it behind, or store it during a voyage and dump it at either end. But the Space Platform would never land. It could roll on forever. And if it heaved out its refuse from airlocks—why—the stuff would still have the Platform's orbital speed and would follow it tirelessly around the Earth until the end of time.

"We dry and store it now," said Brent. "If we were going to live, we'd figure out some way to turn it to fertilizer for the hydroponic gardens. It's hardly worth while as things are. Even then, though, the problem of tin cans could be hopeless."

The Chief wiped his mouth deliberately. He had helped load four guided–missile launching tubes, and he had been brought up to date on the state of things in the Platform. He growled in a preliminary fashion and said, "Joe."

Joe looked at him.

"We brought up six two–ton guided missiles," said the Chief dourly. "We'll have warning of other bombs coming up. We can send these missiles out to intercept 'em. Six of 'em. They can get close enough to set off their proximity fuses, anyhow. But what are we going to do, Joe, if somebody flings seven bombs at us? We can manage six—maybe. But what'll we do with the one that's left over?"

"Have you any ideas?" asked Joe.

The Chief shook his head. Brent said mildly. "We've worked on that here in the Platform, I assure you. And as Sanford puts it quite soundly, about the only thing we can really do is throw our empty tin cans at them."

Joe nodded. Then he tensed. Brent had meant it as a rather mirthless joke. But Joe was astonished at what his own brain made of it. He thought it over. Then he said, "Why not? It ought to be a very good trick."