Operation: Outer Space | Page 6

got the material!"
He felt weight for a moment. It was accompanied by booming noises.
The sounds were not in the air outside, because there was no air. They
were reverberations of the rocket-motors themselves, transmitted to the

fabric of the ship. The ship's steering-rockets were correcting the
course of the vessel and--yes, there was another surge of
power--nudging it to a more correct line of flight to meet the space
platform coming up from behind. The platform went around the world
six times a day, four thousand miles out. During three of its revolutions
anybody on the ground, anywhere, could spot it in daylight as an
infinitesimal star, bright enough to be seen against the sky's blueness,
rising in the west and floating eastward to set at the place of sunrise.
There was again weightlessness. A rocket-ship doesn't burn its
rocket-engines all the time. It runs them to get started, and it runs them
to stop, but it does not run them to travel. This ship was floating above
the Earth, which might be a vast sunlit ball filling half the universe
below the rocket, or might be a blackness as of the Pit. Cochrane had
lost track of time, but not of the shattering effect of being snatched
from the job he knew and thought important, to travel incredibly to do
something he had no idea of. He felt, in his mind, like somebody who
climbs stairs in the dark and tries to take a step that isn't there. It was a
shock to find that his work wasn't important even in the eyes of Kursten,
Kasten, Hopkins and Fallowe. That he didn't count. That nothing
counted ...
There was another dull booming outside and another touch of weight.
Then the rocket floated on endlessly.
A long time later, something touched the ship's outer hull. It was a
definite, positive clanking sound. And then there was the gentlest and
vaguest of tuggings, and Cochrane could feel the ship being
maneuvered. He knew it had made contact with the space platform and
was being drawn inside its lock.
There was still no weight. The stewardess began to unstrap the
passengers one by one, supplying each with magnetic-soled slippers.
Cochrane heard her giving instructions in their use. He knew the
air-lock was being filled with air from the huge, globular platform. In
time the door at the back--bottom--base of the passenger-compartment
opened. Somebody said flatly:

"Space platform! The ship will be in this air-lock for some three hours
plus for refueling. Warning will be given before departure. Passengers
have the freedom of the platform and will be given every possible
privilege."
The magnetic-soled slippers did hold one's feet to the spiral ramp, but
one had to hold on to a hand-rail to make progress. On the way down to
the exit door, Cochrane encountered Babs. She said breathlessly:
"I can't believe I'm really here!"
"I can believe it," said Cochrane, "without even liking it particularly.
Babs, who told you to come on this trip? Where'd all the orders come
from?"
"Mr. Hopkins' secretary," said Babs happily. "She didn't tell me to
come. I managed that! She said for me to name two science men and
two writers who could work with you. I told her one writer was more
than enough for any production job, but you'd need me. I assumed it
was a production job. So she changed the orders and here I am!"
"Fine!" said Cochrane. His sense of the ironic deepened. He'd thought
he was an executive and reasonably important. But somebody higher
up than he was had disposed of him with absent-minded finality, and
that man's secretary and his own had determined all the details, and he
didn't count at all. He was a pawn in the hands of firm-partners and
assorted secretaries. "Let me know what my job's to be and how to do it,
Babs."
Babs nodded. She didn't catch the sarcasm. But she couldn't think very
straight, just now. She was on the space platform, which was the
second most glamorous spot in the universe. The most glamorous spot,
of course, was the moon.
Cochrane hobbled ashore into the platform, having no weight whatever.
He was able to move only by the curious sticky adhesion of his
magnetic-soled slippers to the steel floor-plates beneath him. Or--were
they beneath? There was a crew member walking upside down on a

floor which ought to be a ceiling directly over Cochrane's head. He
opened a door in a side-wall and went in, still upside down. Cochrane
felt a sudden dizziness, at that.
But he went on, using hand-grips. Then he saw Dr. William Holden
looking greenish and ill and trying sickishly to answer questions from
West and Jamison and Bell, who had been plucked from their private
lives just