2001_ A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke [37]
Their menus had been planned with as much care as any part of the mission. The food, most of it freeze-dried, was uniformly excellent, and had been chosen for the minimum of trouble. Packets had merely to be opened and popped into the tiny auto-galley, which beeped for attention when the job was done. They could enjoy what tasted like — and, equally important, looked like — orange juice, eggs (any style), steaks, chops, roasts, fresh vegetables, assorted fruits, ice cream, and even freshly baked bread.
After lunch, from 1300 to 1600 Bowman would make a slow and careful tour of the ship — or such part of it as was accessible. Discovery measured almost four hundred feet from end to end, but the little universe occupied by her crew lay entirely inside the forty-foot sphere of the pressure hull.
Here were all the life-support systems, and the Control Deck which was the operational heart of the ship. Below this was a small “space-garage” fitted with three airlocks, through which powered capsules, just large enough to hold a man, could sail out into the void if the need arose for extravehicular activity.
The equatorial region of the pressure sphere — the slice, as it were, from Capricorn to Cancer — enclosed a slowly rotating drum, thirty-five feet in diameter. As it made one revolution every ten seconds, this carrousel or centrifuge produced an artificial gravity equal to that of the Moon. This was enough to prevent the physical atrophy which would result from the complete absence of weight, and it also allowed the routine functions of living to be carried out under normal — or nearly normal — conditions.
The carrousel therefore contained the kitchen, dining, washing, and toilet facilities. Only here was it safe to prepare and handle hot drinks — quite dangerous in weightless conditions, where one can be badly scalded by floating globules of boiling water. The problem of shaving was also solved; there would be no weightless bristles drifting around to endanger electrical equipment and produce a health hazard.
Around the rim of the carrousel were five tiny cubicles, fitted out by each astronaut according to taste and containing his personal belongings. Only Bowman’s and Poole’s were now in use, while the future occupants of the other three cabins reposed in their electronic sarcophagi next door.
The spin of the carrousel could be stopped if necessary; when this happened, its angular momentum had to be stored in a flywheel, and switched back again when rotation was restarted. But normally it was left running at constant speed, for it was easy enough to enter the big, slowly turning drum by going hand-over-hand along a pole through the zero-gee region at its center. Transferring to the moving section was as easy and automatic, after a little experience, as stepping onto a moving escalator.
The spherical pressure hull formed the head of a flimsy, arrow-shaped structure more than a hundred yards long. Discovery, like all vehicles intended for deep space penetration, was too fragile and unstreamlined ever to enter an atmosphere, or to defy the full gravitational field of any planet. She had been assembled in orbit around the Earth, tested on a translunar maiden flight, and finally checked out in orbit above the Moon. She was a creature of pure space — and she looked it.
Immediately behind the pressure hull was grouped a cluster of four large liquid hydrogen tanks — and beyond them, forming a long, slender V, were the radiating fins that dissipated the waste heat of the nuclear reactor. Veined with a delicate tracery of pipes for the cooling fluid, they looked like the wings of some vast dragonfly, and from certain angles gave Discovery a fleeting resemblance to an old-time sailing ship.
At the very end of the V, three hundred feet from the crew-compartment, was the shielded