Anti-Ice

by Stephen Baxter

  “Bath? A little light supper?” I could scarcely believe my ears. “Sir Josiah, this is neither the time nor the place. And Pocket is hardly in a fit state to—”

  “On the contrary,” Traveller said heavily, fixing me with a knowing glare. “There is nothing better the redoubtable Pocket could do now than fix you a hot bath.” I stared back at Sir Josiah, and then turned to watch Pocket; and the manservant, despite a distressing clumsiness, displayed a markedly increased composure as he tackled these tasks.

  I reflected that Josiah Traveller was perhaps blessed with a greater understanding of his fellow creatures than he cared to affect.

  Already I knew that no end of marvels had been hidden within the padded walls of the Smoking Cabin; but I could scarcely have guessed that it would be possible to take a full, hot bath in conditions quite as comfortable as any middle-range English gentlemen’s club.

  Pocket drew back a section of Turkish rug from the floor to reveal a series of panels; these folded up to form a screen some five feet tall within which I was able to remove my stained clothes in privacy. The section of floor beneath these panels was covered with overlapping rubber sheets, and there were taps laid into recesses in the floor. Pocket turned the taps—finding his body twisting rather comically in response—and from beneath the floor there came the sound of rushing water. At length a pleasant warmth and a few wisps of steam seeped around the rubber sheets, giving the place the atmosphere of a bathhouse.

  When the water was ready Pocket bade me slide between the rubber sheets. Leaving only my head protruding into the air, I entered water which was just on the hot side of comfortable. The bath itself—the size and shape of a coffin, I deduced from its feel—lay beneath the rubber, and the overlapping sheets completely restrained the water which would otherwise have drifted about the air of the Cabin. I lay there feeling the aches depart from my bruised flesh. And when the brave Pocket brought me a brandy—sealed into a snifter-sized globe, from which one sucked the liquor through a small rubber nipple—and as the incongruous smells of cooking meat—and the sound of piano music!—drifted over my screen, I closed my eyes and found it quite impossible to believe that I was at that moment suspended in a small metal can and hurtling between the worlds at five hundred miles per hour.

  I emerged from the bath and allowed Pocket to assist me with a towel. When I was dry I dressed, again with Pocket’s assistance. My clothes had been cleaned and brushed, only superficially, but sufficiently to give me the feeling of freshness and comfort.

  “So, Pocket; and how are you now?”

  “More myself, thank you, sir,” he said, evidently embarrassed.

  “What is your view of our situation? Have you shared such adventures with Sir Josiah before?”

  Pocket’s thin mouth twitched. “We’ve seen some scrapes, I dare say, sir,” he said, “but nothing quite on the scale of this little lot… I have two grandchildren, sir,” he blurted suddenly.

  I straightened my jacket. “Never fear, old chap. I am quite sure it will not be long before Sir Josiah finds a way to reunite you with your family.”

  “He is a resourceful bloke,” Pocket said; and with deft movements—already he seemed to be growing accustomed to our falling conditions—he folded away the privacy screen.

  I touched his bony shoulder. “Tell me,” I said. “Is Traveller aware of your—infirmity?”

  “I suppose you don’t know him all that well, sir. I doubt very much he is aware of any such thing.”

  I was scarcely surprised to see that Traveller had unfolded a small piano from the Cabin wall; he floated before it, one foot locked around a fold-down leg, and played the jolly melodies I had heard earlier. Holden remained sprawled on, or against, his rug; he watched Traveller in a bemused fashion, currently the most ill-at-ease of the four reluctant voyagers.

  He turned to me and forced a smile. “So, are your wounds healed?”

  “Salved, at least; thank you.” I nodded at Traveller. “Will the marvels of the man not cease?”

  Holden raised his eyebrows. “What amazes me is not the fact that he’s playing the piano in interplanetary space—no such feat could surprise me any more—but what he’s playing.”

  I listened more closely, and was startled to recognize one of the bawdier music-hall melodies popular at the time.

  Traveller became aware of our attention and, with an uncharacteristic touch of self-consciousness, abandoned his tune in mid-phrase. “Rather a neat little device,” he observed. “I picked it up at the Exhibition of ’51. Intended for yachts, I think.”

  “Really?” Holden replied drily.

  A gong sounded softly; I turned to observe Pocket hovering in the air, utterly composed, bearing a small disc of metal. “Supper is served, gentlemen.”

  “Splendid!” Traveller cried, and he folded his piano with a snap.

  And so I took part in one of the strangest repasts, surely, in the tangled story of mankind.

  The three of us took our seats. I wore my harness loosely, just sufficiently tight to keep from floating around the place. Pocket spread napkins over our laps and helped us affix wooden trays to our knees with leather straps. The food itself had been wrapped in packets of greased paper which Pocket drew from one of the Cabin’s ubiquitous cubbyholes. Another hinged panel hid a small iron stove into which Pocket inserted his packets. The meal, when served, was of astonishingly high quality; we started with a fish mousse of intense but delicate flavor, followed by slices of roast lamb, potatoes and peas embedded in gravy; and concluded with a heavy syrup pudding. We drank—from globes—a satisfactory French vintage with the main course, and concluded with smaller globes of port, and thick, strongly flavored cigars.

  The whole was served with silver cutlery and on china decorated with the livery of the Prince Albert company, which centered on a crest depicting the Neptunian sculpture decorating the Albert’s Promenade Deck.

  It was a meal that would have graced many a high table across dear, distant England, even if some of the circumstances remained a little peculiar. The only constraint on the food seemed to be the necessity to glue it to its plate or bowl in some way. The gravy served with the main roast, for instance, was thus rather more glutinous than I would otherwise have preferred, but it served its purpose—save for one or two peas which bounced away from my fork.

  But never before had I been served by a waiter who swam through the air like a fish.

  Pocket was allowed to sit with us to eat, as there was no separate galley or kitchen.

  When Pocket had cleared away the debris we sat in the silence of the Smoking Cabin, sipping at our port and watching Earthlight slant through the smoky air. Holden said, “I have to congratulate you on your table, Sir Josiah. I refer both to the quality of the provision, and to the ingenuity with which you have arranged your galley.”

  “Hydraulic presses, that’s the secret,” Traveller said comfortably, and he stretched his long legs out in the air before him. “The food is prepared in a decent restaurant in London I favor from time to time—and then rapidly dried out, in hot ovens, and compressed into those packets you observed. The result is a small, compact bundle which can be stored for some weeks without spoiling, and which requires the application of only a little heat and water to be reconstituted into a fine meal.”

  “Remarkable,” I observed. “And I would hazard that there are many more such meals stored in the walls of this vessel?”

  “Oh, yes,” Traveller said. “We have some weeks’ provisions.”

  Holden relit his cigar. (I noticed how oddly match flames behaved in this falling condition; the flame clustered in a little globe around the head of the match, and would extinguish itself rapidly if one did not draw the match gently through the air to new regions of oxygen.) The journalist said, “I am relieved that we are in little danger of starving to death. But perhaps this is the moment at which we should discuss the provisions available to us in general.”

  The thought of starvation had not en
tered my limited imagination before that moment; but of course Holden was right. After all we were lost in a cold, desolate void, with only the contents of this fragile vessel available to sustain us. I reflected guiltily now on my enjoyment of the meal; perhaps we should already have entered a regime of rations.

  “Very well. As for water,” Traveller said, “we carry several gallons.” He thumped the floor with one bony foot. “It is contained below, in a series of small tanks. One large tank would be unsuitable, you see, for as the craft flies there would be a danger of the water sloshing about—”

  “Several gallons hardly sounds a lot,” I said uneasily. “Especially since I’ve already run a bath.”

  Traveller smiled. “You need not worry, Wickers; bathing water is passed through a series of filters and pipes which enable it to be used several times over. It is fit to drink, even after four or five filterings.” He laughed at our expressions. “But the water we use in the closet—which Pocket will show you later—is vented directly, you will be relieved to hear, from the hull of the craft.” Then his expression melted to one of worry and calculation. “Nevertheless water remains our problem. For water is used as our reaction mass, and I very much fear that our Prussian friend may have expended rather too much of it for comfort.”

  I would have asked for a discourse on this worrying mystery, reaction mass, but Holden was leaning forward urgently. “Sir Josiah, what of air? This is a small vessel. How can four men—or five, counting the Prussian—survive here for more than a few hours?”

  Traveller waved a long-fingered hand languidly. “Sir, you need have no concerns. Once more an ingenious—if I may say so—filtering system is in operation. In one hour a healthy man will absorb the oxygen contained in twenty-five gallons of air, and replace it with carbonic acid, useless for respiration. A pump works continuously to draw the air from this Cabin—and the Bridge—through grilles. The air is passed through potassium chlorate, at a temperature several hundred degrees above room temperature; the chlorate decomposes to the chloride salt of potassium and releases oxygen to replenish the stale air. And then a measure of caustic potash is applied, which combines with the carbonic acid, so removing it from the air.

  “We have stocks of the relevant chemicals sufficient to sustain life for several weeks.”

  “Ah.” Holden nodded, evidently impressed.

  “As for heat and light,” Traveller went on, “acetylene burners power the lamps above our heads, and also heat air which is passed through pipes embedded in the hull of the craft. In fact, bathed as we are in relentless sunlight, it is not cold which is our problem but the danger of being cooked. Hence the slow rotation of the craft which you have observed, and which serves to spread the burden of the sun’s radiation over all parts of the ship’s hull.”

  “Then,” I said, “you see no obstacle to our surviving and returning safely to our home world.”

  “I did not say that, Ned.” His cigar extinguished, Traveller lit up one of his preferred Turkish concoctions. “I designed the Phaeton to conduct observations in the upper atmosphere of the Earth. I even hoped one day to bring it into Earth orbit.” (This concept, which was new to me, was explained later by Holden; it involves the continual falling, under the influence of gravity, of a body around a planet, much as the Little Moon circles the Earth.) “But,” Traveller went on, “the Phaeton is not designed for a flight into deep space.”

  He went on to describe the principles of the marvelous craft’s propulsion system. Anti-ice stoves, it seemed, were used to heat steam to monstrous temperatures. But instead of directing the expansion of the hot gas to a piston (as in the design of the land liner’s drive system), pipes led the steam to the nozzles I had observed affixed to the base of the craft, whence the steam was expelled. By hurling the superheated steam away from itself, the Phaeton drove itself forward. Thus a skater may push away his companion; the companion slides away across the lake, but the skater himself is impelled backwards by the reaction force. This is the principle of the rocket, and the “reaction mass” mentioned earlier by Traveller was the steam hurled away by the rocket.

  This steam emerged from its nozzles at many thousands of miles per hour.

  But even so, to enable the craft to move forwards with an acceleration of twice that due to Earth’s gravity, a full four pounds of water had to be lost to space every second.

  Holden nodded gravely. “Then the weight of the completed craft can be no more than two or three tons.”

  Traveller looked briefly impressed. “The weight of the craft is clearly at a premium,” he said. “And that drove my selection of aluminum as the principal construction material of the hull. It is far lighter than any iron alloy, or steel, despite its absurd price—a full nine sovereigns a pound, as compared to two or three pennies for cast iron.”

  “Good Lord,” Holden said.

  “My choice of water for the reaction material was driven by its wide availability and cheapness—even if the Phaeton were to crash into the sea, a tankful of brine would suffice to get me airborne again.”

  I gestured to the darkened windows. “But there is no ocean out there.”

  “No. We have only what remains in our tanks. And, although I cannot be sure without access to the Bridge, there lies our problem. I very much fear that our Prussian host may have exhausted our supply beyond the point at which we can turn the ship around and reverse its flight from Earth—and even if we could, there may be nothing left to work the rockets so that we could land in a controlled fashion, and not plummet like some meteor into the landscape.”

  I shivered at these words, and crushed the port bulb in my hand.

  6

  EVERYDAY LIFE BETWEEN THE WORLDS

  In our interplanetary capsule we were bereft of day and night—or rather of the Earth’s diurnal rhythms, which had been replaced by the rotation of the Phaeton; if one cared to, one could watch a sunrise every quarter of an hour. But we kept to much the same hours as if we were firmly on English soil. We slept on pallets which folded down from the walls of the Cabin. My bed, into which I bound myself each night with tightly tucked blankets, supported me as if with the softest of mattresses—although, if I worked an arm free in my sleep, it was disconcerting to wake to find it floating before my face, apparently disembodied.

  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 but
tered 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.