The Deep Range - Arthur C. Clarke [28]
Indra’s casual question came as a welcome distraction. She was staring intently up into the western sky, obviously searching for something.
“Is it really true, Walter,” she asked, “that if you know where to look for her you can see Venus in the daytime? She was so bright after sunset last night that I could almost believe it.”
“Its perfectly true,” Franklin answered. “In fact, it isn’t even difficult. The big problem is to locate her in the first place; once you’ve done that, she’s quite easy to see.”
He propped himself up against a palm trunk, shaded his eyes from the glare of the descending sun, and began to search the western sky with little hope of discovering the elusive silver speck he knew to be shining there. He had noticed Venus dominating the evening sky during the last few weeks, but it was hard to judge how far she was from the sun when both were above the horizon at the same time.
Suddenly—unexpectedly—his eyes caught and held a solitary silver star hanging against the milky blue of the sky. “I’ve found her!” he exclaimed, raising his arm as a pointer. Indra squinted along it, but at first could see nothing.
“You’ve got spots before the eyes,” she taunted.
“No—I’m not imagining things. Just keep on looking,” Franklin answered, his eyes still focused on the dimensionless star which he knew he would lose if he turned away from it even for a second.
“But Venus can’t be there,” protested Indra. “That’s much too far north.”
In a single, sickening instant Franklin knew that she was right. If he had any doubt, he could see now that the star he was watching was moving swiftly across the sky, rising out of the west and so defying the laws which controlled all other heavenly bodies.
He was staring at the Space Station, the largest of all the satellites now circling Earth, as it raced along its thousand-mile-high orbit. He tried to turn his eyes away, to break the hypnotic spell of that man-made, unscintillating star. It was as if he was teetering on the edge of an abyss; the terror of those endless, trackless wastes between the worlds began to invade and dominate his mind, to threaten the very foundations of his sanity.
He would have won the struggle, no more than a little shaken, had it not been for a second accident of fate. With the explosive suddenness with which memory sometimes yields to persistent questioning, he knew what it was that had been worrying him for the last few minutes. It was the smell of the fuel that Indra had siphoned from the hydrojet—the unmistakable, slightly aromatic tang of synthene. And crowding hard upon that recognition was the memory of where he had last met that all-too-familiar odor.
Synthene—first developed as a rocket propellant—now obsolete like all other chemical fuels, except for low-powered applications like the propulsion of space suits.
Space suits.
It was too much; the double assault defeated him. Both sight and smell had turned traitor in the same instant. Within seconds, the patiently built dikes which now protected his mind went down before the rising tide of terror.
He could feel the Earth beneath him spinning dizzily through space. It seemed to be whirling faster and faster on its axis, trying to hurl him off like a stone from a sling by the sheer speed of its rotation. With a choking cry, he rolled over on his stomach, buried his face in the sand, and clung desperately to the rough trunk of the palm. It gave him no security; the endless fall began again.… Chief Engineer Franklin, second in command of the Arcturus, was in space once more, at the beginning of the nightmare he had hoped and prayed he need never retrace.
CHAPTER VII
IN THE FIRST shock of stunned surprise, Indra sat staring foolishly at Franklin as he groveled in the