began to grow dark. Until this moment, the Station and the ships floating beside it had been bathed in brilliant light from a sun so fierce that I had not dared to look anywhere near it. But now the Sun was passing behind the Earth as we hurtled across the night side of the planet. I turned my head—and there was a sight so splendid that it completely took away my breath. Earth was now a huge, black disc eclipsing the stars, but all along one edge was a glorious crescent of golden light, shrinking even as I watched. I was looking back upon the line of the sunset, stretching for a thousand miles across Africa. At its centre was a great halo of dazzling gold where a thin sliver of sun was still visible. It dwindled and vanished: the crimson afterglow of the sunset contracted swiftly along the horizon until it too disappeared. The whole thing lasted not more than two minutes, and the men working around me took not the slightest notice of it. After all, in time one gets used even to the most wonderful sights, and the Station circled the Earth so swiftly that sunset occurred every hundred minutes…
It was not completely dark, for the Moon was half full, looking no brighter or closer than it did from Earth. And the sky was so crowded with millions of stars, all shining quite steadily without a trace of twinkling, that I wondered how anyone could ever have spoken of the 'blackness' of space.
I was so busy looking for the other planets (and failing to find them) that I never noticed Tim's return until my tow-rope began to tug. Slowly we moved back towards the centre of the Station, in such utter silence that it hardly seemed real. I closed my eyes for a minute—but the scene hadn't changed when I opened them. There was the great black shield of Earth—no, not quite black, for I could see the oceans glimmering in the moonlight. The same light made the slim girders around me gleam like the threads of a ghostly spider's web, a web sprinkled with myriads of stars.
This was the moment when I really knew that I had reached space at last, and that nothing else could ever be the same again.
Three
THE MORNING STAR
'Now on Station Four, do you know what our biggest trouble used to be?' asked Norman Powell.
'No,' I replied, which was what I was supposed to say.
' Mice ,' he exclaimed solemnly. 'Believe it or not! Some of them got loose from the biology lab., and before you knew where you were, they were all over the place.'
'I don't believe a word of it,' interrupted Ronnie Jordan.
'They were so small they could get into all the air shafts,' continued Norman, unabashed. 'You could hear them scuttling around happily whenever you put your ear to the walls. There was no need for them to make mouse-holes—every room had half a dozen already provided, and you can guess what they did to the ventilation. But we got them in the end, and do you know how we did it?'
'You borrowed a couple of cats.'
Norman gave Ronnie a superior look.
'That was tried, but cats don't like zero gravity. They were no good at all—the mice used to laugh at them. No: we used owls . You should have seen them fly! Their wings worked just as well as ever, of course, and they used to do the most fantastic things. It only took them a few months to get rid of the mice.'
He sighed.
'The problem then, was to get rid of the owls. "We did this…'
I never learned what happened next, for the rest of the gang decided they'd had enough of Norman's tall stories and everyone launched themselves at him simultaneously. He disappeared in the middle of a slowly revolving sphere of bodies, that drifted noisily round the cabin. Only Tim Benton, who never got mixed up in these vulgar brawls, remained quietly studying, which was what everybody else was supposed to be doing.
Every day all the apprentices met in the classroom to hear a lecture from Commander Doyle or one of the Station's technical officers. The Commander had suggested that I should attend these talks—and a
Stephen - Scully 10 Cannell