Islands in the Sky

by Arthur C. Clarke

  2 GOOD-BY TO GRAVITY

  The fall never came, and my moment of panic passed swiftly. The whole thing was an illusion of some kind, for the floor felt firm beneath my feet, whatever my eyes told me. I stopped clutching at the door through which I had entered, the door which my eyes tried to convince me was part of the ceiling.

  Of course, it was absurdly simple! The room I seemed to be looking down at was really seen reflected in a large mirror immediately in front of me, a mirror at an angle of forty-five degrees to the vertical. I was actually standing in the upper part of a tall room that was “bent” horizontally through a right angle, but because of the mirror there was no way of telling this.

  I went down on my hands and knees and cautiously edged my way forward. It took a lot of will power to do this, for my eyes still told me that I was crawling headfirst down the side of a vertical wall. After a few feet, I came to a sudden drop and peered over the edge. There below me, really below me this time, was the room into which I had been looking! The man in the armchair was grinning up at me as if to say, “We gave you quite a shock, didn’t we?” I could see him equally well, of course, by looking at his reflection in the mirror straight ahead of me.

  The door behind me opened and the psychologist came in. He was carrying a long strip of paper in his hand, and he chuckled as he waved it at me.

  “We’ve got all your reactions on the tape, Roy,” he said. “Do you know what this test was for?”

  “I think I can guess,” I said, a little ruefully. “Is it to discover how I behave when gravity is wrong?”

  “That’s the idea. It’s what we call an orientation test. In space you won’t have any gravity at all, and some people are never able to get used to it. This test eliminates most of them.”

  I hoped it wouldn’t eliminate me, and I spent a very uncomfortable half-hour waiting for the doctors to make up their minds. But I needn’t have worried. As I said before, they were on my side and were just as determined to get me through as I was myself.

  The New Guinea mountains, just south of the Equator and rising in places more than three miles above sea level, must once have been about the wildest and most inaccessible spots on earth. Although the helicopter had made them as easy to reach as anywhere else, it was not until the twenty-first century that they became important as the world’s main springboard into space.

  There are three good reasons for this. First of all, the fact that they are so near the Equator means that, because of the earth’s spin, they’re moving from west to east at a thousand miles an hour. That’s quite a useful start for a ship on its way out to space. Their height means that all the denser layers of the atmosphere are below them, thus the air resistance is reduced and the rockets can work more efficiently. And perhaps most important of all is the fact that there are ten thousand miles of open Pacific stretching away from them to the east. You can’t launch spaceships from inhabited areas, because apart from the danger if anything goes wrong, the unbelievable noise of an ascending ship would deafen everyone for miles around.

  Port Goddard is on a great plateau, leveled by atomic blasting, almost two and a half miles up. There is no way to reach it by land—everything comes in by air. It is the meeting place for ships of the atmosphere and ships of space.

  When I first saw it from our approaching jet, it looked like a tiny white rectangle among the mountains. Great valleys packed with tropical forests stretched as far as one could see. In some of those valleys, I was told, there are still savage tribes that no one has ever contacted. I wonder what they thought of the monsters flying above their heads and filling the sky with their roaring!

  The small amount of luggage I had been allowed to take had been sent on ahead of me, and I wouldn’t see it again until I reached the Inner Station. When I stepped out of the jet into the cold, clear air of Port Goddard, I already felt so far above sea level that I automatically looked up into the sky to see if I could find my destination. But I wasn’t allowed time for the search. The reporters were waiting for me, and I had to go in front of the cameras again.

  I haven’t any idea what I said, and fortunately one of the port officials soon rescued me. There were the inevitable forms to be filled. I was weighed very carefully and given some pills to swallow (they made sure that I did, too), and then we climbed aboard a little truck that would take us out to the launching site. I was the only passenger on this trip, as the rocket on which I was traveling was really a freighter.

  Most spaceships, naturally enough, have astronomical names. I was flying on the Sirius, and though she was one of the smaller ships, she looked impressive enough as we came up to her. She had already been raised in her supporting cradle so that her prow pointed vertically at the sky, and she seemed to be balanced on the great triangles of her wings. These would come into action only when she glided back into the atmosphere on her return to earth; at the moment they served merely as supports for the four huge fuel tanks, like giant bombs, which would be jettisoned as soon as the motors had drained them dry. These streamlined tanks were nearly as large as the ship’s hull itself.

  The servicing gantry was still in position, and as I stepped into the elevator I realized for the first time that I had now cut myself off from earth. A motor began to whine, and the metal walls of the Sirius slid swiftly past. My view of Port Goddard widened. Now I could see all the administrative buildings clustering at the edge of the plateau, the great fuel storage tanks, the strange machinery of the liquid ozone plant, the airfield with its everyday jets and helicopters. And beyond all these, quite unchanged by everything that man had done, the eternal mountains and forests.

  The elevator came gently to a halt, and the gates opened on to a short gangway leading into the Sirius. I walked across it, through the open seals of the air lock, and the brilliant tropical sunlight gave way to the cold electric glare of the ship’s control room.

  The pilot was already in his seat, going through the routine checks. He swiveled round as I entered and gave me a cheerful grin.

  “So you’re the famous Roy Malcolm, are you? I’ll try and get you to the station in one piece. Have you flown in a rocket before?”

  “No,” I replied.

  “Then don’t worry. It’s not as bad as some people pretend. Make yourself comfortable in that seat, fasten the straps, and just relax. We’ve still got twenty minutes before take-off.”

  I climbed into the pneumatic couch, but it wasn’t easy to relax. I don’t think I was frightened, but I was certainly excited. After all these years of dreaming, I was really aboard a spaceship at last! In a few minutes, more than a hundred million horsepower would be hurtling me up into the sky.

  I let my eyes roam around the control cabin. Most of its contents were quite familiar from photographs and films, and I knew what all the instruments were supposed to do. The control panel of a spaceship is not really very complicated because so much is done automatically.

  The pilot was talking to the Port Control Tower over the radio, as they went through the pre-take-off routine together. Every so often a time-check broke through the conversations: “Minus fifteen minutes… Minus ten minutes… Minus five minutes.” Though I’d heard this sort of thing so often before, it never fails to give me a thrill. And this time I wasn’t watching it on TV—I was in the middle of it myself.

  At last the pilot said “Over to Automatic” and threw a large red switch. He gave a sigh of relief, stretched his arms, and leaned back in his seat.

  “That’s always a nice feeling,” he said. “No more work for the next hour!”

  He didn’t really mean that, of course. Although the robot controls would handle the ship from now on, he still had to see that everything was going according to plan. In an emergency, or if the robot pilot made an error, he would have to take over again.

  The ship began to vibrate as the fuel pumps started to spin. A complicated pattern of intersecting lines had appeared on the TV screen, having something to do, I supposed, with the course the roc
ket was to follow. A row of tiny lights changed, one after another, from red to green. As the last light turned color, the pilot called to me swiftly, “Make sure you’re lying quite flat.”

  I snuggled down into the couch and then, without any warning, felt as if someone had jumped on top of me. There was a tremendous roaring in my ears, and I seemed to weigh a ton. It required a definite effort to breathe; this was no longer something you could leave to your lungs and forget all about.

  The feeling of discomfort lasted only a few seconds, then I grew accustomed to it. The ship’s own motors had not yet started, and we were climbing under the thrust of the booster rockets, which would burn out and drop away after thirty seconds, when we were already many miles above the earth.

  I could tell when this time came by the sudden slackening of weight. It lasted only a moment, then there was a subtly changed roaring as our own rockets started to fire. They would keep up their thunder for another five minutes. At the end of that time, we would be moving so swiftly that the earth could never drag us back.

  The thrust of the rockets was now giving me more than three times my normal weight. As long as I stayed still, there was no real discomfort. As an experiment, I tried to see if I could raise my arm. It was very tiring, but not too difficult. Still, I was glad to let it drop back again. If necessary, I think I could have sat upright, but standing would have been quite impossible.

  On the TV screen, the pattern of bright lines seemed unaltered. Now, however, there was a tiny spot creeping slowly upward—representing, I supposed, the ascending ship. I watched it intently, wondering if the motors would cut out when the spot reached the top of the screen.

  Long before that happened, there came a series of short explosions, and the ship shuddered slightly. For one anxious moment, I thought that something had gone wrong. Then I realized what had happened: our drop tanks had been emptied, and the bolts holding them on had been severed. They were falling back behind us, and presently would plunge into the Pacific, somewhere in the great empty wastes between Tahiti and South America.

  At last the thunder of the rockets began to lose its power, and the feeling of enormous weight ebbed away. The ship was easing itself into its final orbit, five hundred miles above the Equator. The motors had done their work and were now merely making the last adjustments to our course.

  Silence returned as the rockets cut out completely. I could still feel the faint vibration of the fuel pumps as they idled to rest, but there was no sound whatsoever in the little cabin. My ears had been partially numbed by the roar of the rockets, and it took some minutes before I could hear properly again.

  The pilot finished checking his instruments and then released himself from his seat. I watched him, fascinated, as he floated across to me.

  “It will take you some time to get used to this,” he said, as he unbuckled my safety strap. “The thing to remember is—always move gently. And never let go of one handhold until you’ve decided on the next.”

  Gingerly, I stood up. I grabbed the couch just in time to stop myself from zooming to the ceiling. Only, of course, it wasn’t really the ceiling any more. “Up” and “down” had vanished completely. Weight had ceased to exist, and I had only to give myself a gentle push and move any way I wished.

  It’s a strange thing, but even now there are people who don’t understand this business of “weightlessness.” They seem to think it’s something to do with being “outside the pull of gravity.” That’s nonsense, of course. In a space station or a coasting rocket five hundred miles up, gravity is nearly as powerful as it is down on the earth. The reason why you feel weightless is not because you’re outside gravity, but because you’re no longer resisting its pull. You could feel weightless, even down on earth, inside a freely falling elevator—as long as the fall lasted. An orbiting space station or rocket is in a kind of permanent fall—a “fall” that can last forever because it isn’t toward the earth but around it.

  “Careful, now!” warned the pilot. “I don’t want you cracking your head against my instrument panel! If you want to have a look out of the window, hang on to this strap.” I obeyed him, and peered through the little porthole, whose thick plastic was all that lay between me and nothingness.

  Yes, I know that there have been so many films and photographs that everyone knows just what earth looks like from space. So I won’t waste much time describing it. And to tell the truth, there wasn’t a great deal to see, as my field of view was almost entirely filled by the Pacific Ocean. Beneath me it was a surprisingly deep azure, which softened into a misty blue at the limits of vision. I asked the pilot how far away the horizon was.

  “About two thousand miles,” he replied. “You can see most of the way down to New Zealand and up to Hawaii. Quite a view, isn’t it?”

  Now that I had grown accustomed to the scale, I was able to pick out some of the Pacific islands, many showing their coral reefs quite clearly. A long way toward what I imagined was the west, the color of the ocean changed quite abruptly from blue to a vivid green. I realized I was looking at the enormous floating sea-farms that fed the continent of Asia, and which now covered a substantial part of all the oceans in the tropics.

  The coast of South America was coming into sight when the pilot began to prepare for the landing on the Inner Station. (I know the word “landing” sounds peculiar, but it’s the expression that’s used. Out in space, many ordinary words have quite different meanings.) I was still staring out of the little porthole when I got the order to go back to my seat, so that I wouldn’t fall around the cabin during the final maneuvers.

  The TV screen was now a black rectangle, with a tiny double star shining near its center. We were about a hundred miles away from the station, slowly overhauling it. The two stars grew brighter and farther apart: additional faint satellites appeared sprinkled around them. I knew I was seeing the ships that were “in dock” at the moment, being refueled or overhauled.

  Suddenly one of those faint stars burst into blazing light. A hundred miles ahead of us, one of the ships in that little fleet had started its motors and was pulling away from earth. I questioned the pilot.

  “That would be the Alpha Centauri, bound for Venus,” he replied. “She’s a wonderful old wreck, but it’s really time they pensioned her off. Now let me get on with my navigating. This is one job the robots can’t do.”

  The Inner Station was only a few miles away when we started to put on the brakes. There was a high-pitched whistling from the steering jets in the nose, and for a moment a feeble sensation of weight returned. It lasted only a few seconds; then we had matched speeds and joined the station’s other floating satellites.

  Being careful to ask the pilot’s permission, I got out of my couch and went to the window again. The earth was now on the other side of the ship, and I was looking out at the stars and the Space Station. It was such a staggering sight that I had to stare for a minute before it made any sense at all. I understood, now, the purpose of that orientation test the doctors had given me.

  My first impression of the Inner Station was one of complete chaos. Floating there in space about a mile away from our ship was a great open latticework of spidery girders, in the shape of a flat disk. Here and there on its surface were spherical buildings of varying sizes, connected to each other by tubes wide enough for men to travel through. In the center of the disk was the largest sphere of all, dotted with the tiny eyes of portholes and with dozens of radio antennae jutting from it in all directions.

  Several spaceships, some almost completely dismantled, were attached to the great disk at various points. They looked, I thought, very much like flies caught in a spider-web. Men in space suits were working on them, and sometimes the glare of a welding torch would dazzle my eyes.

  Other ships were floating freely, arranged in no particular system that I could discover, in the space around the station. Some of them were streamlined, winged vessels like the one that had brought me up from earth. Others were the true ships of sp
ace—assembled here outside the atmosphere and designed to ferry loads from world to world without ever landing on any planet. They were weird, flimsy constructions, usually with a pressurized spherical chamber for the crew and passengers, and larger tanks for the fuel. There was no streamlining of course: the cabins, fuel tanks and motors were simply linked together by thin struts. As I looked at these ships I couldn’t help thinking of some very old magazines I’d once seen which showed our grandfather’s idea of spaceships. They were all sleek, finned projectiles looking rather like bombs. The artists who drew those pictures would have been shocked by the reality: in fact they would probably not have recognized these queer objects as spaceships at all.

  I was wondering how we were going to get aboard the station when something came sweeping into my field of vision. It was a tiny cylinder, just big enough to hold a man—and it did hold a man, for I could see his head through the plastic panels covering one end of the device. Long, jointed arms projected from the machine’s body, and it was trailing a thin cable behind it. I could just make out the faint, misty jet to the tiny rocket motor which propelled this miniature spaceship.

  The operator must have seen me staring out at him, for he grinned back as he flashed by. A minute later there came an alarming “clang” from the hull of our ship. The pilot laughed at my obvious fright.

  “That’s only the towing cable being coupled. It’s magnetic, you know. We’ll start to move in a minute.”