Space Station 1
Corriston now was about to develop a sudden, unanticipated impulse to
roam. The fact that he was completely sane gave him an edge over the
space-shocked recruits. There is nothing quite so terrifying to a man
who doubts his own sanity than the thought that unseen eyes are keeping
tabs on him. He feels guilty and acts guilty and almost invariably his
caution deserts him.
Corriston was quite sure that he could carry it off, even if he felt
eyes boring into his back the instant he left the cell. He'd simply
bide his time and seize the first opportunity which presented itself.
Actually, it was easier than he'd imagined it could be. He simply
opened the cell door, walked out; and there was no one in sight to
observe him. So far, so good. The corridor outside was completely
deserted, and when he reached the end of it there was still no one.
He turned left into a large, square reception room and crossed it
without hurrying, his shoulders held straight. Photoelectric eyes? Yes,
possibly, but he had no intention of letting the thought worry him. If
he were being watched mechanically, there was nothing he could do about
it and somehow he didn't think that he had crossed any photoelectric
beams. Certainly no doors had swung open or closed behind him, and
photoelectric alarm system without visible manifestations could be
dismissed as a not too likely possibility.
When Corriston emerged in the glass-encased, wide-view observation
promenade on the Station's Second Level, he was no longer alone. On
all sides men and women jostled him, walking singly and in pairs,
in uniform and in civilian clothes, or hurrying off in dun-gray,
space-mechanic anonymity.
The promenade was crowded almost to capacity and yet the men and women
seemed mere walking dots scattered at random beneath the immense
structures of steel and glass which walled them in. A feeling of
unreality came upon Corriston as he stared upward. He deliberately
moderated his stride, as if fearful that a too rapid movement in
any one direction might send him spinning out into space with a
glass-shattering impetus which he would be powerless to control.
It was an illogical fear and yet he could not entirely throw it off,
and he did not seriously try. It was not nearly as important as the
possibility that he might be being followed. There was no one behind
him who looked in the least suspicious, and no one in front of him
either. But how could he be completely sure?
The answer was that he couldn't. He had to trust his instincts, and so
far they had given him every assurance that he was moving in a free,
independent orbit of his own, completely unobserved.
And then, quite suddenly, he ceased to move at all.
Something quite startling was taking place throughout the length
and breadth of the observation promenade. The men in uniform were
exchanging alarmed glances and departing in haste. The civilians were
crowding closer to the panes. They were collecting in awestruck groups
of blinding light crisscrossed high above their heads.
They were all looking in one direction, but a few of them had been
taken so completely by surprise that they stood motionless in the
middle of the promenade. Corriston was one of the motionless ones, but
his eyes were quick to seek out the nearest viewpane.
At first he thought that a gigantic meteor had appeared suddenly out
of the stellar dark and was rushing straight toward the Station with a
velocity so great as to be almost unimaginable.
Then he realized that it wasn't a meteor. It was a spaceship. And it
wasn't rushing straight toward the Station. It had either bypassed or
encircled the Station and passed beyond it, for it was now heading
out into space again. He could see the long, bright trail left by its
rocket jets, the diffuse incandescence in its wake.
6
An officer with two stripes on his shoulder was standing almost at
Corriston's elbow. He hadn't turned to depart, and for some reason he
seemed reluctant to do so. The space-ship's erratic course seemed to
absorb him to the exclusion of all else.
He started swearing under his breath. Then he saw Corriston and a
strange look came into his face. He looked at Corriston steadily for a
moment, then looked quickly away.
Corriston edged slowly away from him and joined the nearest group of
civilians. They were all talking at once and it was hard to understand
precisely what they were saying. But after a moment a few enlightening
fragments of information greatly lessened his bewilderment.
"_That freighter was preparing to land at the Station, but for some
reason it couldn't make contact. It never even began to decelerate._"
"_How do you know?_"
"_I asked one of the officers--that gray-haired man over there. He was
plenty worried. I guess that's why he talked so freely. He'd had some
kind of dispute with the captain, apparently. He told me that trouble
developed aboard that freighter when it was eight or ten thousand
miles away. An emergency message came through, but for some reason the
captain kept it pretty much to himself._"
Watching the freighter's hull blaze with friction as it went into a
narrow orbit about Earth, Corriston tried hard to make himself believe
that the particular manner of a spaceman's departure was simply one,
tragic aspect of a calculated risk, that men who lived dangerously
could hardly expect to die peacefully in their beds. But it was a
rationalization without substance. In an immediate and very real sense
he was inside the freighter, enduring an eternity of torment, sharing
the agonizing fate that was about to overtake the crew.
Nearer and nearer to Earth the freighter swept, completely encircling
the planet like a runaway moon with an orbital velocity so great the
eye could hardly follow it.
"It will blast out a meteor pit as wide as the Grand Canyon if it
explodes on land," someone at Corriston's elbow said. "I wouldn't care
to be within a hundred miles of it."
"Neither would I. It could wipe out a city, all right--any city within
a radius of thirty miles. This is _really_ something to watch!"
The freighter had encircled Earth twice and was now so close to its
blue-green oceans and the dun-colored immensity of its continental land
masses that it had almost disappeared from view. It had dwindled to a
tiny, glowing pinpoint of radiance crossing the face of the planet,
an erratically weaving firefly that had abandoned all hope of guiding
itself by a light that was about to flare up with explosive violence
and put an end to its life.
The freighter was invisible when the end came. It was invisible when
it struck and rebounded and channeled a deep pit in a green valley on
Earth. But the explosion which followed was seen by every man and woman
on the Station's wide-view promenade.
There were three tremendous flares, each opening and spreading outward
like the sides of a funnel, each a livid burst of incandescence
spiraling outward into space.
As seen from the Station the flares were not, of course, so tragically
spectacular. They resembled more successive flashes of almost
instantaneous brightness, flashes such as had many times been produced
by the tilting of a heliograph on the rust-red plains of Mars under
conditions of maximum visibility.
It takes an experienced eye to interpret such phenomena correctly, and
among the spectators on the promenade there were a few, no doubt, who
were not even quite sure that the freighter _had_ exploded.
But Corriston had no doubts at all on that score. The full extent of
the tragedy would be revealed later by radio communication from Earth.
There was a long silence before anyone spoke. The group around
Corriston seemed paralyzed by shock, unable to express in words how
blindly hopeful they had dared to be, or how fatalistic from the
first. There were a few moist eyes among the women, an awkward, almost
reverent shuffling of feet.
Then the young man at Corriston's elbow cleared his throat and said in
a barely audible whisper: "It didn't come down in the sea."
"I know," Corriston said. "It came down in North America, close to the
Canadian border."
"In the United States?"
"Yes, I think so. We can't be sure. It's too much to hope there was no
destruction of human life after an explosion of that magnitude."
Corriston suddenly realized that he was behaving like a man who
had taken complete leave of his wits. He was drawing more and more
attention to himself when he should have been bending all of his
efforts toward making himself as inconspicuous as possible.
Fortunately the agitation of everyone on the promenade was helping to
remedy his blunder. His wisest course now was simply to recede as an
individual, to move silently to the perimeter of the group and just as
silently vanish.
He was confident that he could accomplish it. He began elbowing his
way backwards until there were a dozen men and women in front of him.
He let himself be observed briefly as a grim-lipped spectator who
had taken such an emotional pounding that he could endure no more.
Suddenly he saw his chance and took it. There was another small group
of civilians close to the group he had joined, and he ducked quickly
behind them, using their turned-away backs as a shield. He edged
toward a paneled door on his right, his only concern for the moment
being a comparatively simple one. He must get away from the crowded
promenade as swiftly as possible.
He reached the door, swung the panel wide, and stepped into the long,
brightly-lighted compartment beyond without a backward glance. Almost
immediately he perceived that he had committed an act of folly. The
compartment was a promenade cafeteria and it was crowded with an
overflow of agitated men and women discussing the tragedy in heated
terms.
_Keep cool now. None of these people are interested in you. Keep cool
and keep on walking. There's another door and you can be through it in
less than a minute_, Corriston told himself.
There was a pretty waitress behind the long counter, and as he came
abreast of her she smiled at him. For an instant he hesitated, eyed
the stool opposite her, and fought off an incongruous but almost
irresistible impulse to sit down. Quick warmth and sudden sympathy.
Yes, he could do with a bit of both, Corriston thought.
It was sheer insanity, but he _did_ sit down. He eased himself into the
stool and ordered a cup of coffee.
"Something with it?" the waitress asked. "A sandwich, or--"
"No, no, I don't think so," Corriston said quickly. "Just the coffee."
The waitress seemed in no hurry to depart. "It was pretty terrible what
happened. Wasn't it?"
"Did you see it?" Corriston asked.
"I saw most of it. I saw the ship go past the Station and start to
explode. I saw that black wing, or whatever it was, drop off. Then
someone started shouting in here and I came back. They say it crashed
on Earth."
"That's right," Corriston said, telling himself that he was a damned
fool for wanting to look at her hair and hear her friendly woman's
voice when every passing second was adding to his danger.
"You saw it crash?"
Corriston nodded. "I just came from the promenade."
"That was a crazy thing to ask you. How excited can you get? I saw you
come through that door. You looked kind of pale."
"I still feel that way," Corriston said.
The waitress then said a surprising thing: "I wonder what it is about
some men. You just have to look at them once and you know they're the
sort you'd like to be with when something terrible happens. You know
what I mean?"
"Sure," Corriston said. "Any port in a storm."
The waitress smiled again. "I don't mean that, exactly. Please don't
think I'm handing you a line. There's just something ... comfortable