2001_ A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke [15]
The pilot’s voice was firm and confident as it came over the cabin speaker. “Please observe all Zero-gee regulations. We will be docking at Space Station One in forty-five minutes.”
The stewardess came walking up the narrow corridor to the right of the closely spaced seats. There was a slight buoyancy about her steps, and her feet came away from the floor reluctantly as if entangled in glue. She was keeping to the bright yellow band of Velcro carpeting that ran the full length of the floor — and of the ceiling. The carpet, and the soles of her sandals, were covered with myriads of tiny hooks, so that they clung together like burrs. This trick of walking in free fall was immensely reassuring to disoriented passengers.
“Would you like some coffee or tea, Dr. Floyd?” she asked cheerfully.
“No thank you,” he smiled. He always felt like a baby when he had to suck at one of those plastic drinking tubes.
The stewardess was still hovering anxiously around him as he popped open his briefcase and prepared to remove his papers.
“Dr. Floyd, may I ask you a question?”
“Certainly,” he answered, looking up over his glasses.
“My fiancé is a geologist at Clavius,” said Miss Simmons, measuring her words carefully, “and I haven’t heard from him for over a week.”
“I’m sorry to hear that; maybe he’s away from his base, and out of touch.”
She shook her head. “He always tells me when that’s going to happen. And you can imagine how worried I am — with all these rumors. Is it really true about an epidemic on the Moon?”
“If it is, there’s no cause for alarm. Remember, there was a quarantine back in ‘98, over that mutated flu virus. A lot of people were sick — but no one died. And that’s really all I can say,” he concluded firmly.
Miss Simmons smiled pleasantly and straightened up.
“Well, thank you anyway, Doctor. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
“No bother at all,” he said gallantly, but not very accurately. Then he buried himself in his endless technical reports, in a desperate last-minute assault on the usual backlog.
He would have no time for reading when he got to the Moon.
Chapter 8
Orbital Rendezvous
Half an hour later the pilot announced: “We make contact in ten minutes. Please check your seat harness.”
Floyd obeyed, and put away his papers. It was asking for trouble to read during the celestial juggling act which took place during the last 300 miles; best to close one’s eyes and relax while the spacecraft was nudged back and forth with brief bursts of rocket power.
A few minutes later he caught his first glimpse of Space Station One, only a few miles away. The sunlight glinted and sparkled from the polished metal surfaces of the slowly revolving, three-hundred-yard-diameter disk. Not far away, drifting in the same orbit, was a sweptback Titov-V spaceplane, and close to that an almost spherical Aries-1B, the workhorse of space, with the four stubby legs of its lunar-landing shock absorbers jutting from one side.
The Orion III spacecraft was descending from a higher orbit, which brought the Earth into spectacular view behind the Station. From his altitude of 200 miles, Floyd could see much of Africa and the Atlantic Ocean. There was considerable cloud cover, but he could still detect the blue-green outlines of the Gold Coast.
The central axis of the Space Station, with its docking arms extended, was now slowly swimming toward them. Unlike the structure from which it sprang, it was not rotating — or, rather, it was running in reverse at a rate which exactly countered the Station’s own spin. Thus a visiting spacecraft could be coupled to it, for the transfer of personnel or cargo, without being whirled disastrously around.
With the softest of thuds, ship and Station made contact. There were metallic, scratching noises from outside, then the brief