the earth’s atmosphere and went from blue to black.
At last he opened his eyes. He wanted to stretch but that was impossible. Alex looked out of the window and saw stars … thousands of them. Millions. Once again, he had no sense of movement. Was he really weightless? He fumbled a hand into one of the pockets in his trousers and brought out a pencil a few centimetres long. He let it go. The pencil floated in front of him. Alex stared at it. Before he knew what he was doing, he was laughing. He couldn’t stop himself. It really was like one of those cheap special effects in a Hollywood film. But there were no hidden wires. No computer trickery. It was happening right before his eyes.
“Alex? How are you? Are you receiving me?” Ed Shulsky’s voice crackled in his ear, and the strange thing was that it sounded no different, no further away—even though Alex was already almost a hundred miles from the earth’s surface.
“I’m fine,” Alex replied, and there was a tone of wonderment in his voice. He had survived the launch. He was on his way.
“Congratulations. You’ve just broken a world record. You’re the youngest person in space…” He was in space! With the shock of the launch behind him, Alex tried to relax and enjoy the view. But the windows were too small and in the wrong place. The earth was behind him and out of sight, but there were the stars and the infinite blackness all around. How strange it was, this sense that he was going nowhere.
The pencil was still in front of him. He touched it with his finger and watched it spin. Round and round it went. Alex was hypnotized by it. Nothing else seemed to be moving. This wasn’t a ride at all. He felt as if everything, his entire life, had stopped.
And then he saw Ark Angel.
At first he was aware of something shaped like a spider appearing in the periscope attached to the window inside the capsule. It looked like a star, but much brighter than the others. Gradually it drew closer. And suddenly it became clear, an awesome construction of silver modules and corridors, interlocking, criss-crossing, hanging from what looked like the tower of a crane, with massive panels stretching out in every direction, absorbing the energy of the sun. It was huge; it weighed almost seven hundred tonnes. But it was floating effortlessly in the great emptiness of space, and Alex had to remind himself that every piece of it had been laboriously constructed on earth and then carried up separately and assembled. It was an engineering feat beyond anything he had ever imagined.
Slowly Ark Angel filled his vision. Both he and the space station were travelling at seventeen and a half thousand miles per hour, so fast that to Alex it made no sense at all. But he seemed to be going very slowly.
Then a booster rocket fired and the Soyuz accelerated, moving in on the central docking port. It was the only way Alex could measure his progress through outer space … a few metres at a time, getting closer and closer. The rockets were controlled from Flamingo Bay but they were accurate to a fraction of a millimetre.
Alex saw the curving metal plates, the intricate panel work that made up the space station. He saw a painted Union Jack and the words ARK ANGEL printed in grey.
The last part of the journey seemed to take for ever. The space station was swallowing him up and he had to remind himself that if something went wrong now it would have the impact of a bus smashing into a wall.
There was a slight jolt—nothing compared to what he had felt earlier. That was it. A voice crackled in his headset and he thought he heard applause—unless it was radio static. Whatever his misgivings about Professor Sing, it seemed that the flight director had been true to his word. Alex had arrived.
He looked at his watch. Someone had given it to him when he got dressed for the launch. Three o’clock. He had one and a half hours to find the bomb and either turn it off or move it. But there was something wrong.
For a second Alex panicked. Had the oxygen supply stopped? He swallowed hard, three or four times, gasping for air. He could feel his heart hammering and he was certain he was going to die. But it wasn’t that. There was still air in the module—he just had to draw it in. Alex forced himself to calm down. What was it?
Of course. The silence. Nobody was talking to him. Either he was on the wrong side of the planet, out of range of the control centre, or the radio had broken down. The silence was total, absolute. He had never felt more empty, more alone. But it didn’t matter. He didn’t need anyone to talk to him.
He knew what he had to do.
He unstrapped himself and reached for the circular hatch just above his head. It was his first experience of zero gravity and he knew at once that he’d made a mess of it. He rose out of the seat far too quickly and his head thudded into the metal wall, knocking him back down again. He ended up where he had begun—but with a bruised forehead and the taste of blood in his mouth. A bad start.
Everything had to be done slowly. He reached up again and found the handle. He pulled it out and turned it. The hatch swung outwards.
Alex braced himself. If there was any error, if the airlock wasn’t secured, he would be exposed to the most lethal environment known to man. And he would die the most horrible death. The air would be sucked out of his lungs and his blood would boil. All his internal organs would seize up and he would be ripped apart by the total vacuum of space. He tried not to think about it. It wasn’t going to happen. In less than ninety minutes he would be on his way home.
He found himself looking into a tunnel, about eighty centimetres wide and a couple of metres long. This was the entrance—they called it the node—between his capsule and the reception area of Ark Angel.
Reconditioned air, cold and dry, blew into his face. He pushed up with his feet, the lightest movement possible. Effortlessly, he rose. It was just like he had seen in countless films. He was flying.
The node led into the first module. Ark Angel had been built for tourists. It called itself a space hotel. But of course, it was in truth a space station very similar to Mir or the ISS, with very little room and every available inch crammed with cupboards, lockers and all the wires, pipes, dials, gauges, switches, circuits and other essentials needed to keep its inhabitants alive. Each section was a cylinder about the size of an ordinary caravan, lit with a harsh white light and jammed with equipment and handrails on three sides.
There were more handrails and Velcro straps on the fourth. Alex understood that to stop himself floating off he would have to hook his hands or feet into the floor.
He had expected the interior to be silent. Instead he was aware of the humming of the air conditioners, the throb of pumps circulating liquid coolants through the walls, the grinding of metal against metal… tonnes of it bolted together even as it spun round in orbit. He breathed in deeply. The air was very dry. He wondered how it was produced. Did it come out of a bottle or was there a machine?
Alex floated—or tried to. Once again, he pushed too hard with his feet and the entire chamber turned upside
