Dr Francis closed the door of his cabin and gestured Abel into a seat. All the furniture in the Station was bolted to the floor, but Abel noticed that Dr Francis had unscrewed his chair so that he could tilt it backwards. The huge vacuum-proof cylinder of the doctor’s sleeping tank jutted from the wall, its massive metal body able to withstand any accident the Station might suffer. Abel hated the thought of sleeping in the cylinder – luckily the entire crew quarters were accident-secure – and wondered why Dr Francis chose to live alone up on A-Deck.
‘Tell me, Abel,’ Dr Francis began, ‘has it ever occurred to you to ask why the Station is here?’
Abel shrugged. ‘Well, it’s designed to keep us alive, it’s our home.’
‘Yes, that’s true, but obviously it has some other object than just our own survival. Who do you think built the Station in the first place?’
‘Our fathers, I suppose, or grandfathers. Or their grandfathers.’
‘Fair enough. And where were they before they built it?’
Abel struggled with the reductio ad absurdum. ‘I don’t know, they must have been floating around in mid-air!’
Dr Francis joined in the laughter. ‘Wonderful thought. Actually it’s not that far from the truth. But we can’t accept that as it stands.’
The doctor’s self-contained office gave Abel an idea. ‘Perhaps they came from another Station? An even bigger one?’
Dr Francis nodded encouragingly. ‘Brilliant, Abel. A first-class piece of deduction. All right, then, let’s assume that. Somewhere away from us, a huge Station exists, perhaps a hundred times bigger than this one, maybe even a thousand. Why not?’
‘It’s possible,’ Abel admitted, accepting the idea with surprising ease.
‘Right. Now you remember your course in advanced mechanics – the imaginary planetary system, with the orbiting bodies held together by mutual gravitational attraction? Let’s assume further that such a system actually exists. Okay?’
‘Here?’ Abel said quickly. ‘In your cabin?’ Then he added ‘In your sleeping cylinder?’
Dr Francis sat back. ‘Abel, you do come up with some amazing things. An interesting association of ideas. No, it would be too big for that. Try to imagine a planetary system orbiting around a central body of absolutely enormous size, each of the planets a million times larger than the Station.’ When Abel nodded, he went on. ‘And suppose that the big Station, the one a thousand times larger than this, were attached to one of the planets, and that the people in it decided to go to another planet. So they build a smaller Station, about the size of this one, and send it off through the air. Make sense?’
‘In a way.’ Strangely, the completely abstract concepts were less remote than he would have expected. Deep in his mind dim memories stirred, interlocking with what he had already guessed about the Station. He gazed steadily at Dr Francis. ‘You’re saying that’s what the Station is doing? That the planetary system exists?’
Dr Francis nodded. ‘You’d more or less guessed before I told you. Unconsciously, you’ve known all about it for several years. A few minutes from now I’m going to remove some of the conditioning blocks, and when you wake up in a couple of hours you’ll understand everything. You’ll know then that in fact the Station is a space ship, flying from our home planet, Earth, where our grandfathers were born, to another planet millions of miles away, in a distant orbiting system. Our grandfathers always lived on Earth, and we are the first people ever to undertake such a journey. You can be proud that you’re here. Your grandfather, who volunteered to come, was a great man, and we’ve got to do everything to make sure that the Station keeps running.’
Abel nodded quickly. ‘When do we get there – the planet we’re flying to?’
Dr Francis looked down at his hands, his face growing sombre. ‘We’ll never get there, Abel. The journey takes too long. This is a multi-generation space vehicle, only our children will land and they’ll be old by the time they do. But don’t worry, you’ll go on thinking of the Station as your only home, and that’s deliberate, so that you and your children will be happy here.’
He went over to the TV monitor screen by which he kept in touch with Captain Peters, his fingers playing across the control tabs. Suddenly the screen lit up, a blaze of fierce points of light flared into the cabin, throwing a brilliant phosphorescent glitter across the walls, dappling Abel’s hands and suit. He gaped at the huge balls of fire, apparently frozen in the middle of a giant explosion, hanging in vast patterns.
‘This is the celestial sphere,’ Dr Francis explained. ‘The starfield into which the Station is moving.’ He touched a bright speck of light in the lower half of the screen. ‘Alpha Centauri, the star around which revolves the planet the Station will one day land upon.’ He turned to Abel. ‘You remember all these terms I’m using, don’t you, Abel? None of them seems strange.’
Abel nodded, the wells of his unconscious memory flooding into his mind as Dr Francis spoke. The TV screen blanked and then revealed a new picture. They appeared to be looking down at an enormous top-like structure, the flanks of a metal pylon sloping towards its centre. In the background the starfield rotated slowly in a clockwise direction. ‘This is the Station,’ Dr Francis explained, ‘seen from a camera mounted in the nose boom. All visual checks have to be made indirectly, as the stellar radiation would blind us. Just below the ship you can see a single star, the Sun, from which we set out 50 years ago. It’s now almost too distant to be visible, but a deep inherited memory of it is the burning disc you see in your dreams. We’ve done what we can to erase it, but unconsciously all of us see it too.’
He switched off the set and the brilliant pattern of light swayed and fell back. ‘The social engineering built into the ship is far more intricate than the mechanical, Abel. It’s three generations since the Station set off, and birth, marriage and birth again have followed exactly as they were designed to. As your father’s heir great demands are going to be made on your patience and understanding. Any disunity here would bring disaster. The conditioning programmes are not equipped to give you more than a general outline of the course to follow. Most of it will be left to you.’
‘Will you always be here?’
Dr Francis stood up. ‘No, Abel, I won’t. No one here lives forever. Your father will die, and Captain Peters and myself.’ He moved to the door. ‘We’ll go now to Conditioning. In three hours’ time, when you wake up, you’ll find yourself a new man.’
Letting himself back into his cabin, Francis leaned wearily against the bulkhead, feeling the heavy rivets with his fingers, here and there flaking away as the metal slowly rusted. When he switched on the TV set he looked tired and dispirited, and gazed absently at the last scene he had shown Abel, the boom camera’s view of the ship. He was just about to select another frame when he noticed a dark shadow swing across the surface of the hull.
He leaned forward to examine it, frowning in annoyance as the shadow moved away and faded among the stars. He pressed another tab, and the screen divided into a large chessboard, five frames wide by five deep. The top line showed Control, the main pilot and navigation deck lit by the dim glow of the instrument panels, Captain Peters sitting impassively before the compass screen.
Next, he watched Matthias Granger begin his afternoon inspection of the ship. Most of the passengers seemed reasonably happy, but their faces lacked any lustre. All spent at least 2–3 hours each day bathing in the UV light flooding through the recreation lounge, but the pallor continued, perhaps an unconscious realization that they had been born and were living in what would also be their own tomb. Without the continuous conditioning sessions, and the hypnotic reassurance of the sub-sonic voices, they would long ago have become will-less automatons.
Switching off the set, he prepared to climb into the sleeping cylinder. The airlock was three feet in diameter, waist-high off the floor. The time seal rested at zero, and he moved it forward 12 hours, then set it so that the seal could only be broken from within. He swung the
lock out and crawled in over the moulded foam mattress, snapping the door shut behind him.
Lying back in the thin yellow light, he slipped his fingers through the ventilator grille in the rear wall, pressed the unit into its socket and turned it sharply. Somewhere an electric motor throbbed briefly, the end wall of the cylinder swung back slowly like a vault door and bright daylight poured in.
Quickly, Francis climbed out onto a small metal platform that jutted from the upper slope of a huge white asbestos-covered dome. Fifty feet above was the roof of a large hangar. A maze of pipes and cables traversed the surface of the dome, interlacing like the vessels of a giant bloodshot eye, and a narrow stairway led down to the floor below. The entire dome, some 150 feet wide, was revolving slowly. A line of five trucks was drawn up by the stores depot on the far side of the hangar, and a man in a brown uniform waved to him from one of the glass-walled offices.
At the bottom of the ladder he jumped down on to the hangar floor, ignoring the curious stares from the soldiers unloading the stores. Halfway across he craned up at the revolving bulk of the dome. A black perforated sail, 50 feet square, like a fragment of a planetarium, was suspended from the roof over the apex of the dome, a TV camera directly below it, a large metal sphere mounted about five feet from the lens. One of the guy-ropes had snapped and the sail tilted slightly to reveal the catwalk along the centre of the roof.
He pointed this out to a maintenance sergeant warming his hands in one of the ventilator outlets from the dome. ‘You’ll have to string that back. Some fool was wandering along the catwalk and throwing his shadow straight on to the model. I could see it clearly on the TV screen. Luckily no one spotted it.’
‘Okay, Doctor, I’ll get it fixed.’ He chuckled sourly. ‘That would have been a laugh, though. Really give them something to worry about.’
The man’s tone annoyed Francis. ‘They’ve got plenty to worry about as it is.’
‘I don’t know about that, Doctor. Some people here think they have it all ways. Quiet and warm in there, nothing to do except sit back and listen to those hypno-drills.’ He looked out bleakly at the abandoned airfield stretching away to the cold tundra beyond the perimeter, and turned up his collar. ‘We’re the boys back here on Mother Earth who do the work, out in this Godforsaken dump. If you need any more spacecadets, Doctor, remember me.’
Francis managed a smile and stepped into the control office, made his way through the clerks sitting at trestle tables in front of the progress charts. Each carried the name of one of the dome passengers and a tabulated breakdown of progress through the psychometric tests and conditioning programmes. Other charts listed the day’s rosters, copies of those posted that morning by Matthias Granger.
Inside Colonel Chalmers’ office Francis relaxed back gratefully in the warmth, describing the salient features of his day’s observation. ‘I wish you could go in there and move around them, Paul,’ he concluded. ‘It’s not the same spying through the TV cameras. You’ve got to talk to them, measure yourself against people like Granger and Peters.’
‘You’re right, they’re fine men, like all the others. It’s a pity they’re wasted there.’
‘They’re not wasted,’ Francis insisted. ‘Every piece of data will be immensely valuable when the first space ships set out.’ He ignored Chalmers’ muttered ‘If they do’ and went on: ‘Zenna and Abel worry me a little. It may be necessary to bring forward the date of their marriage. I know it will raise eyebrows, but the girl is as fully mature at 15 as she will be four years from now, and she’ll be a settling influence on Abel, stop him from thinking too much.’
Chalmers shook his head doubtfully. ‘Sounds a good idea, but a girl of 15 and a boy of 16 –? You’d raise a storm, Roger. Technically they’re wards of court, every decency league would be up in arms.’
Francis gestured irritably. ‘Need they know? We’ve really got a problem with Abel, the boy’s too clever. He’d more or less worked out for himself that the Station was a space ship, he merely lacked the vocabulary to describe it. Now that we’re starting to lift the conditioning blocks he’ll want to know everything. It will be a big job to prevent him from smelling a rat, particularly with the slack way this place is being run. Did you see the shadow on the TV screen? We’re damn lucky Peters didn’t have a heart attack.’
Chalmers nodded. ‘I’m getting that tightened up. A few mistakes are bound to happen, Roger. It’s damn cold for the control crew working around the dome. Try to remember that the people outside are just as important as those inside.’
‘Of course. The real trouble is that the budget is ludicrously out of date. It’s only been revised once in 50 years. Perhaps General Short can generate some official interest, get a new deal for us. He sounds like a pretty brisk new broom.’ Chalmers pursed his lips doubtfully, but Francis continued ‘I don’t know whether the tapes are wearing out, but the negative conditioning doesn’t hold as well as it used to. We’ll probably have to tighten up the programmes. I’ve made a start by pushing Abel’s graduation forward.’
‘Yes, I watched you on the screen here. The control boys became quite worked up next door. One or two of them are as keen as you, Roger, they’d been programming ahead for three months. It meant a lot of time wasted for them. I think you ought to check with me before you make a decision like that. The dome isn’t your private laboratory.’
Francis accepted the reproof. Lamely, he said ‘It was one of those spot decisions, I’m sorry. There was nothing else to do.’
Chalmers gently pressed home his point. ‘I’m not so sure. I thought you rather overdid the long-term aspects of the journey. Why go out of your way to tell him he would never reach planet-fall? It only heightens his sense of isolation, makes it that much more difficult if we decide to shorten the journey.’
Francis looked up. ‘There’s no chance of that, is there?’
Chalmers paused thoughtfully. ‘Roger, I really advise you not to get too involved with the project. Keep saying to yourself they’re-not-going-to-Alpha-Centauri. They’re here on Earth, and if the government decided it they’d be let out tomorrow. I know the courts would have to sanction it but that’s a formality. It’s 50 years since this project was started and a good number of influential people feel that it’s gone on for too long. Ever since the Mars and Moon colonies failed, space programmes have been cut right back. They think the money here is being poured away for the amusement of a few sadistic psychologists.’
‘You know that isn’t true,’ Francis retorted. ‘I may have been over-hasty, but on the whole this project has been scrupulously conducted. Without exaggeration, if you did send a dozen people on a multi-generation ship to Alpha Centauri you couldn’t do better than duplicate everything that’s taken place here, down to the last cough and sneeze. If the information we’ve obtained had been available the Mars and Moon colonies never would have failed!’
‘True. But irrelevant. Don’t you understand, when everyone was eager to get into space they were prepared to accept the idea of a small group being sealed into a tank for 100 years, particularly when the original team volunteered. Now, when interest has evaporated, people are beginning to feel that there’s something obscene about this human zoo; what began as a grand adventure of the spirit of Columbus, has become a grisly joke. In one sense we’ve learned too much – the social stratification of the three families is the sort of unwelcome datum that doesn’t do the project much good. Another is the complete ease with which we’ve manipulated them, made them believe anything we’ve wanted.’ Chalmers leaned forward across the desk. ‘Confidentially, Roger, General Short has been put in command for one reason only – to close this place down. It may take years, but it’s going to be done, I warn you. The important job now is to get those people out of there, not keep them in.’
Francis stared bleakly at Chalmers. ‘Do you really believe that?’
‘Frankly, Roger, yes. This project should never have been launched. You can’t manipulate people the way we’
re doing – the endless hypno-drills, the forced pairing of children – look at yourself, five minutes ago you were seriously thinking of marrying two teenage children just to stop them using their minds. The whole thing degrades human dignity, all the taboos, the increasing degree of introspection – sometimes Peters and Granger don’t speak to anyone for two or three weeks – the way life in the dome has become tenable only by accepting the insane situation as the normal one. I think the reaction against the project is healthy.’
Francis stared out at the dome. A gang of men were loading the so-called ‘compressed food’ (actually frozen foods with the brand names removed) into the commissary hatchway. Next morning, when Baker and his wife dialled the pre-arranged menu, the supplies would be promptly delivered, apparently from the space-hold. To some people, Francis knew, the project might well seem a complete fraud.
Quietly he said: ‘The people who volunteered accepted the sacrifice, and all it involved. How’s Short going to get them out? Just open the door and whistle?’
Chalmers smiled, a little wearily. ‘He’s not a fool, Roger. He’s as sincerely concerned about their welfare as you are. Half the crew, particularly the older ones, would go mad within five minutes. But don’t be disappointed, the project has more than proved its worth.’
‘It won’t do that until they “land”. If the project ends it will be we who have failed, not them. We can’t rationalize by saying it’s cruel or unpleasant. We owe it to the 14 people in the dome to keep it going.’
Chalmers watched him shrewdly. ‘14? You mean 13, don’t you, Doctor? Or are you inside the dome too?’
This ship had stopped rotating. Sitting at his desk in Command, planning the next day’s fire drill, Abel noticed the sudden absence of movement. All morning, as he walked around the ship – he no longer used the term Station – he had been aware of an inward drag that pulled him towards the wall, as if one leg were shorter than the other.
The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard Page 48