The only viewport was a small thing in the forward end of the tug. Naturally we came in ass-backwards so I didn’t see much.
Today we call it the Skylark, and what you see as you approach is a sphere half a kilometer across. It rotates every two minutes, and there’s all kinds of junk moored to the axis of rotation. Mirrors, the laser and power targets, the long thin spine of the mass driver, the ring of agricultural pods, the big telescope; a confusion of equipment.
It wasn’t that way when I first saw it. The sphere was nearly all there was, except for a spiderweb framework to hold the solar power panels. The frame was bigger than the sphere, but it didn’t look very substantial. At first sight the Shack was a pebbled sphere, a golf ball stuck in a spider’s web.
McLeve met me at the airlock. He was long of limb, and startlingly thin, and his face and neck were a maze of wrinkles. But his back was straight, and when he smiled the wrinkles all aligned themselves. Laugh-lines.
Before I left Earth I read up on his history: Annapolis, engineer with the space program (didn’t make astronaut because of his eyes); retired with a bad heart; wrote a lot of science fiction. I’d read most of his novels in high school, and I suppose half the people in the space program were pulled in by his stories.
When his wife died he had another heart attack. The Old Boys network came to the rescue. His classmates wangled an assignment in space for him. He hadn’t been to Earth for seven years, and low gravity was all that kept him alive. He didn’t even dare go to the Moon. A reporter with a flair for mythological phraseology called him “The Old Man of Space.” It was certain that he’d never go home again, but if he missed Earth he didn’t show it.
“Welcome aboard.” He sounded glad to see me. “What do they call you?” he asked.
A good question. Cornelius might sound a dignified name to a Roman, but it makes for ribald comments in the USA. “Corky,” I told him. I shrugged, which was a mistake: we were at the center of the sphere, and there wasn’t any gravity at all. I drifted free from the grabhandle I’d been clinging to and drifted around the airlock.
After a moment of panic it turned out to be fun. There hadn’t been room for any violent maneuvers in the tug, but the airlock was built to get tugs and rocket motors inside for repairs; it was big, nine meters across, and I could twirl around in the zero gravity. I flapped my arms and found I could swim.
McLeve was watching with a critical air. He must have liked what he saw because he grinned slightly. “Come on,” he said. He turned in the air and drifted without apparent motion—it looked like levitation. “I’ll show you around.” He led the way out of the airlock into the sphere itself.
We were at the center of rotation. All around, above and below, were fields of dirt, some plowed, some planted with grass and grains.
There were wings attached to hooks at the entrance. McLeve took down a set and began strapping them on. Black bat wings. They made him look like a fallen angel, Milton’s style. He handed me another pair. “Like to fly?” he asked.
I returned the grin. “Why not?” I hadn’t the remotest idea of what I was doing, but if I could swim in the air with my hands, I ought to be able to handle wings in no gravity. He helped me strap in, and when I had them he gave some quick instructions.
“Main thing is to stay high,” he said. “The further down the higher the gravity, and the tougher it is to control these things.” He launched himself into space, gliding across the center of the sphere. After a moment I followed him.
I was a tiny chick in a vast eggshell. The landscape was wrapped around me: fields and houses, and layout yards of construction gear, and machinery, and vats of algae, and three huge windows opening on blackness. Every direction was down, millions of light years down when a window caught my attention. For a moment that was terrifying. But McLeve held himself in place with tiny motions of his wings, and his eyes were on me. I swallowed my fear and looked.
There were few roads. Mostly the colonists flew with their wings, flew like birds, and if they didn’t need roads, they didn’t need squared-off patterns for the buildings either. The “houses” looked like they’d been dropped at random among the green fields. They were fragile partitions of sheet metal (wood was far more costly than sheet steel here), and they could not have borne their own weight on Earth, let alone stand up to a stiff breeze. They didn’t have to. They existed for privacy alone.
I wondered about the weather. Along the axis of the sphere I could see scores of white puffballs. Clouds? I gathered my courage and flapped my way over to the white patch. It was a flock of hens. Their feet were drawn up, their heads were tucked under their wings, and they roosted on nothing.
“They like it in zero gravity,” McLeve said. “Only thing is, when you’re below them you have to watch out.”
He pointed. A blob of chicken splat had left the flock and moved away from us. It fell in a spiral pattern. Of course the splat was actually going in a straight line—we were the ones who were rotating, and that made the falling stuff look as if it were spiraling to the ground below.
“Automatic fertilizer machine,” I said.
McLeve nodded.
“I wonder you don’t keep them caged,” I said.
“Some people like their sky dotted with
