Next a stout band of rubber and leather was affixed around my chest. This corset-like affair was uncomfortably tight, but Traveller explained how the device would assist my chest muscles as I labored to breathe without the assistance of external air pressure.
Now I donned the outer layer, which was a one-piece combination affair with attached mittens and overboots. This coverall was of resined leather. Leather was used, explained Traveller, because of the tendency of india rubber to dry out and become fragile in a vacuum. The most striking aspect of the coverall was that it was silvered; an ingenious process had permitted its soaking in silver plate so that it looked as if it were woven from spun mercury. This was intended to exclude the direct rays of the sun, Traveller said, and I began to understand the paradoxical complications facing the space engineer; direct sunlight, without the blanket of atmosphere, is violent and must be guarded against, but simultaneously heat leaks from any shadowed area since, again, there is no layer of air to trap it.
The outer suit opened at the front and I clambered awkwardly into it. The suit was fitted at the neck with a collar of copper just wide enough to admit my head. This collar fitted to the inner rubber suit, forming an airtight seal; air was smoothed out of the interface between the outer and inner suits and the outer was sealed up by flaps and straps.
I raised my silvered, mittened hand. “I feel odd. Greased up and encased in this garment, with its mittens and booties, I am like some grotesque infant!”
Traveller grunted impatiently. “Wickers, the outfit is not designed for comic effect. What need do you have, for example, of an infantryman’s heavy boots, since your feet do not have to bear any weight? Now if you’ve quite finished your prattle let us fit the helmet.”
The topping-off of the air suit consisted of a globular helmet of copper; circular windows of thick optical glass were fitted in the metal, and a pair of hoses, bound together, was fitted to the crown of the helmet. These pipes led, Traveller explained, to a pump located inside the air cupboard itself. Traveller floated before me holding this intimidating cage in his long fingers, and said, “Well, Ned, once you are sealed up in this case it will be difficult for us to talk to you.” He clapped one hand on my suited shoulder and said, “I wish you Godspeed, my boy. You were, of course, right; it is no virtue to go down into darkness without a fight.”
I found I had to swallow before I could speak. “Thank you, sir.”
Pocket leaned toward me. “You take my prayers as well, Mr. Vicars.”
“Ned.” Holden’s face was grim, and his deep-sunk eyes appeared on the verge of tears. “I wish I were twenty years younger, and able to take your place.”
“I know you do, George.” As I hovered there encased in my bizarre integuments, I found the steady gaze of all three of my colleagues most distressing. I said, struggling to maintain the composure of my face, “I see no point in further delay, Sir Josiah. The helmet?”
Pocket and Traveller lifted the globe over my head carefully, chafing my ears on its rim only slightly. The rim engaged the copper collar at my neck, and the two gentlemen turned the helmet about. The low grinding of screw threads filled the echoing helmet, and there was a smell of burnished copper, of rubber, resin and the incongruous stink of whale blubber. The four windows of the helmet turned around me, and glimpses of the Cabin slid past my gaze as if I were at the center of some unusual magic lantern.
At last the helmet was fitted into its seat, and one of the windows had come to rest before my face. I was encased in a silence broken only by a steady hissing from above my head—the reassuring signature of the air pipes which circulated air through my helmet, delivering me fresh oxygen and extracting the carbonic acid I expelled.
Traveller loomed before my face window, his features creased with concern and curiosity. His voice came to me only as a distant muffle. “Are you all right? Can you breathe comfortably?” My breathing was shallow, but as much, I suspected, from my nervousness as from the air supply, and I seemed capable—given the corset around my chest—of drawing quite deep breaths in perfect comfort. The only disadvantage of the piped supply was a slightly metallic flavor to the air. And so, at length, I made a “thumbs up” sign to Traveller, and indicated by mittened gestures my impatience to enter the air cupboard and get on with it.
Traveller and Pocket now guided me, one arm each, to the aperture in the lower bulkhead and thence into the air cupboard. They laid me face down, directly over the wheel arrangement which would permit me to open the hull, and sealed closed the hatch behind me. As the light of the Cabin was excluded, and I was encased in copper-tinged darkness with only the sound of my own breathing for company, my heart began to hammer as if it would burst.
I reached through the dark for the wheel before my chest, grasped it with my mittened hands, and twisted it firmly.
At first there was only the grind of metal on metal—and then, with a sudden, shocking explosion, the hatch flew back on its hinges and out of my hands. Sound died with a soft sigh, and a moment of gale pushed me in the back and propelled me forward; I grabbed at the doorframe but my mittened fingers slithered across the metal, and I tumbled helplessly out of the
Suddenly there was nothing above, around, below me; and for the next few moments I lost control of my reactions. I cried for help—unheard, of course, in the soundless vacuum of space—and I scrabbled at my suit and air hoses like some animal.
This first reaction passed, however, and by force of will I restored a semblance of rationality.
I closed my eyes and tried to steady my breathing, frightened of overtaxing my supply. I was merely floating, after all, a sensation which was hardly novel after so many days, and I calmed myself with the illusion that I was safe within the aluminum walls of the
I flexed my elbows and knees cautiously. Thanks to trapped air the suit joints were a good deal stiffer than inside the craft, and my fingers and feet tingled, warning me of constrictions in my circulation. But on the whole Traveller’s elaborate precautions had proved successful.
With courage grasped in both hands, I opened my eyes—and found I had been rendered virtually blind by a condensation which had gathered over my helmet windows. Beyond this homely mist there were blurs of white and blue that must be the sun and Earth; and I decided I must be floating in the vacuum some yards from the vessel. I raised my mittens and dabbed at the face plate, but the mist, of course, had gathered inside the helmet. And, I abruptly realized, I had no way of reaching inside the helmet to attend to this matter; my own face was as inaccessible to me as the mountains of the Moon!
Of course, on this realization, I was plagued with a series of itches in nose, ears and eyes; I determinedly put these aside. But my sightlessness was a more serious problem, and I felt baffled. After some moments, though, I suspected the mist was clearing slightly, and I wondered if the pumped air was causing the panes to clear. I resolved to wait for several minutes, a time during which I would control my breathing as far as I could, to see if matters improved.
At length the panes did clear enough for me to see out, but they never cleared entirely, and I grew convinced that this problem of condensation, which had been utterly unanticipated even by the genius of Traveller, would form a major obstacle to the future colonization of space. But the steady breathing which I maintained for some minutes did coincidentally have a calming effect on me.
As soon as my visor had cleared, then, I gazed fearfully out into my new domain.
I floated in a sky that was utterly black; not even stars shone, for the sun—a sphere too bright to study, hanging to my left hand side—rendered other objects invisible. There were no clouds, of course, and, in the absence of atmosphere, not even the faint azure tinge of a dark Earth night.
Ahead of me the Moon hung cold and austere, her seas and mountains picked out in sharp gray tones. I turned to the Earth, which was a wonderful sculpture in blue and white; the Little Moon was a speck of light which crawled low across the sunlit face of the globe. The outlines of the continents could clearly be seen—it was, I saw, noon in North America—and it was as if the planet were some vast timepiece, arranged for my amusement.
It was difficult to believe, from my astonishing height, that even now, as dawn broke over Europe, the armies of France and Prussia were preparing to launch at each other once more. How absurd such horror, such squalor, seemed from this lofty height! Perhaps, I thought with a touch of terrifying pride, I had acquired the perspective of the gods; perhaps when all men had the chance to study the world from this vantage, war, envy and greed would be banished from our hearts.
I remembered Francoise, and I prayed silently that she, and all the millions of others trapped in that bowl of light, would remain safe through this day.
