“I’m afraid Mven Mass is incapable of a cold analysis,” said Veda.
“That’s as it should be, if he were he wouldn’t write anything outstanding,” objected Darr Veter, as he rose to his feet to say good-bye.
“Till our next meeting!” Erg and Nisa held out their hands to him. “Hurry up and finish that job of yours or we shan’t meet again.”
“Yes, we shall,” promised Darr Veter confidently. “Even if it’s only in the El Homra Desert before the take-off.”
“Before the take-off,” repeated the astronauts.
“Come on, my angel of heaven,” said Veda Kong as she took Darr Veter by the arm, pretending not to notice his knitted brows. “You’re probably fed up with Earth?”
Darr Veter stood with his feet wide apart on the still shaky structure that formed the skeleton of the hull and looked down into the fearful abyss between the clouds. Our planet was there and its tremendous size could still be felt at a distance of five times its own diameter: he could see the grey outlines of the continents and the violet of the seas.
Darr Veter recognized outlines that had been familiar to him from childhood through pictures taken from satellites. There was the concave line with dark strips of mountains stretching across it. To the right the sea sparkled and directly under his feet was a narrow mountain valley. He was in luck that day — the clouds had parted directly over that part of the planet where Veda was living and working. At the foot of the vertical terraces of iron-coloured mountains there was an ancient cave that went deep into the earth in a number of extensive storeys. It was there that Veda was selecting from amongst the dumb and dusty fragments of past life those grains of historical truth without which the present could not be properly understood nor the future foreseen.
Darr Veter, leaning over the rail of a platform of corrugated zirconium bronze sent a mental greeting to the spot, roughly conjectured, that was fast disappearing under the wing of the cirrus clouds of intolerable brightness coming up from the west. The darkness of night stood like a wall sprinkled with shining stars. Layers of clouds floated by like gigantic rafts hanging one over the other. Below them the Earth’s surface was rolling into the darkening abyss as though it were disappearing for ever into the absolute. A delicate zodiacal light clothed the dark side of the planet shedding its glow into Cosmic space.
There was a layer of light-blue clouds over the daylight side of Earth that reflected the powerful light of the blue-grey Sun. Anybody who looked at the clouds except through dark filters would be blinded as would anybody unprotected by the 800 kilometres of Earth’s atmosphere who turned his face to the Sun. The harsh short-wave rays — ultra-violet and X-rays were irradiated in a powerful stream that was lethal to all living things. A constant downpour of cosmic particles was added to the stream. Newly-awakened stars or those that had collided at unimaginably great distances in the Galaxy sent deadly radiation out into space. Only the reliable protection of their spacesuits saved the workers from speedy death.
Darr Veter threw the safety line over to the other side and moved towards the radiant dipper of Ursa Major. A giant pipe had been fixed in position throughout the entire length of the future satellite. At either end acute-angled triangles rose up from it to support the discs radiating the magnetic field. When the batteries transforming the Sun’s blue radiations into electricity were installed it would be possible to do away with lifelines and walk along the lines of force in the magnetic field with directional plates on the chest and back.
“We want to work at night.” The voice of a young engineer, Cadd Lite, suddenly sounded in his space helmet. “Altai has promised to provide the light.”
Darr Veter looked to the left and below where a bunch of cargo rockets, tied together, lay like sleeping fish. Above them, under a flat roof to protect it from meteorites and the Sun, floated the temporary platform built from the inner plating of the satellite where all the components brought by the rockets were stored and assembled. Workers crawling there like black bees suddenly turned to glow-worms when the reflecting surfaces of their space-suits moved beyond the shadow of the roof. A cobweb of ropes stretched from the gaping hatches in the sides of the rockets out of which big components were being unloaded. Higher still, directly over the hull of the satellite, a group of people in strange, often ridiculous, poses were busy round a huge machine. One ring of beryllium bronze with borason plating would have weighed at least a hundred tons on Earth. Here the huge mass was dangling beside the metal skeleton of the satellite on a thin wire rope whose only purpose was to keep all these components rotating round Earth at the same velocity.
The workers became confident and agile once they had become accustomed to the absence of weight or rather, to the negligible weights. These skilled workers, however, would soon have to be replaced by others. Lengthy periods of physical labour without gravitation lead to disturbances in blood circulation which might become chronic and make the sufferer a permanent invalid on his return to Earth. For this reason the shift on the satellite was one of fifty working hours after which the worker returned to Earth, going through reacclimatization at the Intermediate Station revolving round the Earth at a height of 900 kilometres.
Darr Veter directed the assembly of the satellite and tried to avoid physical exertion although, at times, he badly wanted to help hasten the completion of some job or another. He would have to hold out at a height of 57,000 kilometres for several months.
If he agreed to night work he would have to send his young workers back to the planet and call others before time. Barion, the construction job’s second planetship was on the Arizona Plain where Groin Orme sat at the TVP screens and registration machine controls.
A decision to work through the entire icy Cosmic night would have reduced the time required for assembling the satellite by one half and Darr Veter could not let such an opportunity pass. As soon as they had obtained h’s consent the workers came down from the platform, running about in all directions, making a still more complicated network of ropes. The planetship Altai that served as living quarters for the satellite builders and hung motionless, moored to one end of the satellite’s main beam, suddenly cast off the hawsers that linked her main hatch with the satellite. A long stream of blinding flame shot out of her exhausts. The huge ship swung round swiftly and silently, not the slightest noise carrying through the emptiness of interplanetary space. The skilled commander of Altai needed no more than a few strokes of his engines to send the ship forty metres above the structure and turn with his landing lights directed at the assembly platform. Hawsers were again dropped between the ship and the satellite and the whole mass of objects suspended in space became motionless relative to each other as they continued their revolutions round the Earth at a speed of about ten thousand kilometres an hour.
The distribution of the cloud masses told Darr Veter that the construction job was passing over the Antarctic region of the planet and would, therefore, soon enter Earth’s shadow. The improved heating system of the spacesuit could not fully guarantee its wearer against the bitter cold of Cosmic space and woe betide the careless traveller who exhausted his batteries. An architect-erector had been killed that way a month before when he hid from a meteorite shower in the cold shell of an open rocket. He did not live to reach the sunny side of the planet. Another engineer was killed by a meteorite — such occurrences could not be foreseen or prevented with any degree of certainty. The building of a satellite always claimed its victims and nobody knew who would be the next. The laws of stochastics, although only partly applicable to such tiny particles as individual people, said that he, Darr Veter, would most probably be the next because he would be there, at that height and open to all the vagaries of the Cosmos, longer than anybody else. There was an impudent little inner voice, however, that told Darr Veter that nothing could possibly happen to his magnificent person. No matter how ridiculous such confidence may have been for a mathematically minded man it never abandoned Darr Veter and helped him calmly balance himself on narrow girders and grilles on the open, unprotected hull of the satellite in the abyss of the black sky.