Part 7 (1/2)

”Sanford does act oddly,” he said uncomfortably. ”When he met me in the lock he said our coming was useless. He talked about the futility of everything while I reported. He sounds like he sneers at every possible action as useless.”

”Most likely it is,” Brent said mildly. ”Here, anyhow. It does look as if we're going to be knocked off. But Sanford's taking it badly. The rest of us have let him act as he pleased because it didn't seem to matter. It probably doesn't, except that he's annoying.”

Mike said truculently, ”We won't be knocked off! We've got rockets of our own up here now! We can fight back if there's another attack!”

Brent shrugged. His face was young enough, but deeply lined. He said as mildly as before: ”Your landing rockets set off four bombs on the way from Earth. You brought us six more rocket missiles. How many bombs can we knock down with them?”

Joe blinked. It was a shock to realize the facts of life in an artificial satellite. If it could be reached by bombs from Earth, the bombs could be reached by guided missiles from the satellite. But it would take one guided missile to knock down one bomb--with luck.

”I see,” said Joe slowly. ”We can handle just six more bombs from Earth.”

”Six in the next month,” agreed Brent wrily. ”It'll be that long before we get more. Somebody sent up four bombs today. Suppose they send eight next time? Or simply one a day for a week?”

Mike made an angry noise. ”The seventh bomb shot at us knocks us out!

We're sitting ducks here too!”

Brent nodded. He said mildly:

”Yes. The Platform can't be defended against an indefinite number of bombs from Earth. Of course the United States could go to war because we've been shot at. But would that do us any good? We'd be shot down in the war.”

Joe said distastefully, ”And Sanford's cracked up because he knows he's going to be killed?”

Brent said earnestly. ”Oh, no! He's a good scientist! But he's always had a brilliant mind. Poor devil, he's never failed at anything in all his life until now! Now he _has_ failed. He's going to be killed, and he can't think of any way to stop it. His brains are the only things he's ever believed in, and now they're no good. He can't accept the idea that he's stupid, so he has to believe that everything else is. It's a necessity for him. Haven't you known people who had to think everybody else was stupid to keep from knowing that they were themselves?”

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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 pa.s.sage 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 gla.s.s ports in the sidewall. Outside the gla.s.s were metal shutters. Brent served out dense goggles, almost black, and touched the b.u.t.tons that opened the steel port coverings.

They looked into s.p.a.ce. The dimmer stars were extinguished by the goggles they wore. The brighter ones seemed faint and widely s.p.a.ced.

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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 s.p.a.ce.

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 nouris.h.i.+ng 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.