Atomic Station

It was incredible and a little frightening. The rocket ship was within a half million miles of the Station, but as yet no reply had come to the frantic signals which Roger Sheldon had been sending out at ten second intervals.

He sat before the observation glass in the control room, a big man with the competent hands of an experienced navigator, and a curious mobility of expression which seemed out of keeping with the precise movements which those hands were making on the board.

His face was that of a man who had gazed on great unfathomable star fields smouldering in the depths of space and then—had deliberately curbed his exaltation and turned back to concern himself with the little affairs of Earth.

In three months and two days Roger Sheldon had passed completely beyond the Sun's gravitational tug into the utter darkness, the chill bleak immensity of interstellar space. To have accomplished more he would have bartered all the years of his youth. He had hardly dared hope to accomplish as much.

Now he was returning to the Station with his thoughts in a turmoil. His nerves were so taut he was afraid to relax even for the brief instant it would have taken him to shake a few grains of amytal into his palm and inhale the fumes.

For two generations the Station had encircled the Earth, an outpost of security bright with promise, the concrete embodiment of humanity's determination not to destroy itself.

While atomic research had remained in the uranium fission stage, the vast laboratory facilities of Earth had not endangered humanity. Even the first atomic bombs had not placed an intolerable strain on man's capacity to survive the hazards of working together toward a shared goal.

But the tremendous series of explosions which had rocked the Earth on June sixteenth, in 1969, had convinced even men of good will that a controlled, disciplined release of the mighty forces locked up within the atom could no longer take place on Earth.

It could only be allowed in an orbit far enough removed from Earth to jeopardize only the Station itself and the lives of a few men. Carefully integrated psychometric tests had shown that not more than a dozen men could coordinate their efforts under the constant threat of annihilation without developing personality quirks as dangerous as trigger neutrons would have been in the days of the New Mexico experiment.

Seventy million miles from the Earth the Station moved through the interplanetary night, a mile-long floating laboratory. This laboratory was equipped with every safety device known to modern science for the control of energies powerful enough to disrupt every vestige of matter within a half million miles of its orbit.

In 2022 a dozen men could have destroyed the Earth. Instead, on that little self-contained macrocosm, containing accommodations for fewer than a hundred men, women and children, the first interstellar ship had been constructed and powered with undreamed of energies.

To that little macrocosm the ship was now returning, piloted by one of those twelve men.

Sheldon would have thrown back his head and laughed long and heartily if someone had suggested that power could go to the head of a man like John Gale. Nominally Gale, a great bundle of immense kindliness, as selfless as a carven Buddha, was in command of the Station. But it was of no great consequence who was in command, because those men really could be trusted.

Sheldon stiffened abruptly. His eyes shifted from the control board to the observation glass. Unmistakably the gravity scanners had picked up a moving object in the darkness ahead, and were transmitting it to the glass, line by hazy line until a filmy opacity was hovering in the precise middle of the instrument.

Sheldon recognized the Station from the peculiar flatness of its contours. At a quarter million miles it showed up as a misty ovoid, flattened at both ends and faintly rimmed with light. By pressing hard with its thumb on both sides of a clay egg a child could have produced a fair facsimile of the Station as it appeared in the glass, except that the image was in rapid motion.

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