Anti-Ice

7 ALONE

I was all for plunging straight on with my adventure, for it was still early in the morning; but Traveller insisted that to propel myself out of the ship without making adequate preparations would reduce my slight chances of success to zero.

So it was that Traveller determined that a full two days should elapse before I was to enter the coffin- shaped air cupboard. Although I was unsure as to the effect of this delay on my fragile courage and mental state, I ceded the position.

Traveller went to work on my physical preparedness. “You are entering an unexplored realm, and it is impossible to be sure what effect the environment of space will have on your body, clothed in its protective suit as it will be,” he said. So he put me on an intensive diet of light meals, with plenty of bread and soup. Traveller insisted on—and enforced—a slow chewing of every mouthful, so as to avoid the possibility of swallowing air. At first I railed against this regime, but Traveller curtly pointed out that a stomach filled with gas is like a balloon; and in the airless vacuum of space there would be no atmosphere to constrain the unlimited expansion of such a balloon under pressure from the air contained within…

He extended this analogy in brutal terms; and I chewed my bread with renewed enthusiasm.

I was fed cod liver oil and various other iron solutions, whose purpose was to enhance my strength, and from a small pharmacy Traveller maintained, doses of senna pods and syrup of figs, in order that I might be cleansed internally of all unwanted baggage. As I strained under the agony of these medicaments I wondered if I had entered a sort of Purgatory, an anteroom to the airless Hell I would face beyond the hull.

Finally Traveller mixed a solution of a bromide salt in my tea. This puzzled me, although I had heard of such potions being fed to infantrymen in the field. At length Traveller took me to one side and explained that the purpose of the bromide was to restrain what he called certain impulses common to young men of my age and temperament, which might have unfortunate consequences for a body locked into an air suit. I was bewildered by this; for, although I thought often of Françoise during those dark days, my thoughts were more in the form of silent prayers for her safety and our eventual reunion than any more excitable speculation; and it was difficult to envisage any such notions distracting me at my moment of greatest peril!

Still, I took Traveller’s bromide with good humor.

The first night was difficult to face, for Traveller expressly forbade any alcohol with my meals; and as I lay in my pallet within the darkened Cabin my heart pounded and sleep seemed impossibly far away. After perhaps an hour of this I rose and complained to Traveller. With many muttered protests he rose—the bobble on his nightcap floated behind him as he glided through the air—and prepared for me a powerful sleeping draft. With this inside me I slept a dreamless sleep; and Traveller repeated the dose on the next evening.

So it was that I awoke on 15 August 1870, somewhere beyond the atmosphere of Earth, with my body purged, cleansed and relaxed, ready to journey alone into the endless void beyond the hull of the Phaeton.

Traveller had me strip naked save for a brief pair of shorts, and he gave me a greasy, sour-smelling oil which he bade me smear over all my skin below my neck. “This is an extract of whale blubber,” he said. “It has three purposes: the first is to nourish the skin; the second is to retain the heat of the body; and the third, and most important, is to provide a seal between your skin and the material of the air suit.”

Holden looked puzzled by this. “Then the air suit will not provide a shell of air around Ned’s body?”

“Such a shell would swell up instantly, like a balloon, under the pressure of the air it contained,” Traveller said. “It would become quite rigid, trapping the space voyager as if crucified in an immovable box.” He held out his arms and legs in the air and waggled his fingers helplessly, miming such a predicament.

I had had no idea that air—invisible, intangible—could exert such forces.

Once I was greased up, Pocket opened up the air cupboard and extracted Traveller’s patent air suit. The suit consisted of undergarments and an outer coverall; the undergarments—combinations, gloves and boot-like stockings—were of india rubber. I was made to squeeze any stray air bubbles out of the space between the rubber and my skin. I was fortunate that my physique was at least roughly comparable to that of Traveller for whom the suit had been tailored, and the undergarments fitted well enough, chafing only around the armpits and knees.

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 Phaeton and into empty space!

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 Phaeton.

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 Françoise, and I prayed silently that she, and all the millions of others trapped in that bowl of light, would remain safe through this day.

Ahead of me, hanging before the face of the Moon, was the Phaeton herself. The craft was about thirty feet from me and appeared to lie on her side; her three stubby legs jutted from her base, useless, and in that base I saw the open port through which I had emerged. The whole effect was of some rather absurd, fragile toy, the shadows of the legs and other features as sharp as stencils across her hull; and I had a sudden shock of dislocation as I recalled the last time I had seen the ship from the outside, perched proudly atop the Prince Albert in the soft Belgian sunshine.

The twin hoses looped across space, connecting me to the air cupboard; and I decided that I must have fallen to the full extent of the pipes and then bounced back by some yards.

I reached above my head to the hose which was fixed there and, using both mittened hands, began to haul myself awkwardly along the tubes to the brougham. The exertion caused my breathing to speed up and my face-window steamed over once more; but I was still able to see the vessel and so proceeded. At last I fetched up against the air cupboard hatch; I clung securely to one leg of the craft and waited for some minutes for my faceplate to clear.

I imagined Holden, Pocket and Traveller not ten feet above my head, resting as warm and comfortable as in any living-room.

I pulled my way up the leg and reached the lower skirt of the main hull of the craft. On to the vessel’s curving aluminum skin, Traveller had instructed me, had been fastened many small handles, designed to assist repairmen and other engineers. These and other protuberances made the task of pulling myself along the Phaeton’s hull toward the Bridge quite easy. I proceeded slowly, taking care that my air hoses did not snag. As I worked silver flaked from my leather suit, so that I became surrounded by a cloud of sparkling fragments.

After a few minutes I was clinging like some silvered insect to the hull just below the dome which covered the Bridge. A few feet above me was the wheeled hatch through which I would enter the vessel.

I had gone over the required sequence of events from this point with Holden and Traveller, and, we had concluded rather grimly, I had only one possible course of action. All trace of my celestial mood of a few minutes earlier dissipated. I closed my eyes and listened to the rush of blood in my ears. I had never before killed a man; nor had I seriously contemplated the possibility of such an action. But, I told myself resolutely, the inhabitant of that Bridge was no civilized man; he was a Hun, an animal who had attempted to take the lives of four men, and who had also, in all probability, joined in the conspiracy to wreck the Prince Albert.

He had shown no mercy, and deserved none.

So, with my resolve renewed, I pulled myself above the sill of the windowed dome.

I braced my feet against handles set in the lower hull and turned the wheel which would open the hatch. Speed was of the essence. The Bridge occupant was no experienced space voyager, of course, any more than the rest of us; and would, perhaps, understand little of the deadly implications of this grotesquely suited figure appearing outside his window. So we had hoped.

As I worked I made out the interior of the Bridge. Amid the banks of elaborate instruments a lone figure drifted forward, gazing up at me with more curiosity than fear. He wore a bright red jacket. He made no move to stop me—but, I realized with a sinking heart, he held an advantage which we should have foreseen.

In his hand was a pistol, pointed squarely at my chest.

I considered abandoning my quest and ducking back to safety—but what would that avail me? If ever I were to enter the Bridge by this route, this was surely my best chance. In any event, if he were to take a shot at me he would surely blast a hole in one or more glass panes, thereby allowing his air to escape and so destroying himself as well as me!

…But would our saboteur understand this?

And then again, whatever the state of our pilot’s thoughts, what of my own? Now that I saw this “monstrous Hun” as a real human figure with a life and past of his own, did I have the resolve to kill him in this way?

All this passed through my feverish soul in a few seconds. Abruptly I concluded that I would sooner die from a clean bullet through the heart than suffocate slowly; and if I should destroy the saboteur, well, it was no more than he had intended for me, Françoise, Traveller, and thousands of others at the launch of the Prince Albert!

So, with renewed vigor, I turned the wheel.

The saboteur moved away from the windows, and the fist which held the pistol wavered.

In an instant, the seal broke. The hatch flapped up, narrowly missing my faceplate, and a gale thrust at my chest. I kept firm hold of my wheel with both hands; I was pulled aside and driven against the Bridge windowglass. Papers and other fragments billowed around me, and I saw the sparkle of ice crystals on the breeze.

The saboteur was prepared for none of this.

He was bowled through the air toward the hatchway; as he tumbled through the frame his pistol fell harmlessly from his shocked fingers and disappeared into the blackness, and with his fingertips the saboteur clung to the lip of the hatch, hanging there on the very rim of infinity! One yellow boot fell from his dangling leg and tumbled away into space; long black hair flapped across his brow, and he turned an agonized face to mine, tongue blue and protruding, eyes frozen over.

But, despite these grotesqueries, and despite the ultimate peril of that moment, I recognized the man and found room for a fresh shock. For this was no Prussian saboteur; this was Frédéric Bourne, companion of Françoise!

The last vestiges of air had escaped now; Bourne’s head lolled back, and his fingers loosened on the hatchway rim. Without further thought I grabbed at his wrist. Then, using my one free hand rather awkwardly, I hauled my way into the Bridge. My airhoses and the unfortunate Bourne came dangling after me, Bourne bumping hard against the frame. Once inside I shoved Bourne deeper into the interior of the craft, and dragged in a few more feet of hose.

I grabbed at the hatch and slammed it closed, trapping my hoses, and labored to turn the wheel.

As soon as my hose was blocked the comforting susurrus of piped air, my constant companion through this jaunt, died away. Traveller had estimated that I should have sufficient seconds of air in my helmet and the remaining few feet of hose to allow me to open the way to my colleagues in the Smoking Cabin. But these calculations seemed remote as I labored in a suit that grew as tight and constricting as any iron maiden, and as my helmet turned at last into an impenetrable fog of condensation.

I pushed myself to the floor and groped blindly across it, staring through my panes of mist in the vain hope of espying the hatchway. My head began to pound and my chest to ache, and I imagined the carbonic acid expelled by my lungs clustering about my face like some poison—

My feet, scrabbling over the floor, encountered a wheel set on a raised hatch. I grabbed it with both hands, uttering a fervent prayer of thanks, and hauled at the wheel with what strength I had left… but to no avail. Exploration by touch informed me that a crowbar had been jammed into the spokes of the wheel, completely restricting its movement.

It was the work of a moment to remove the bar, and then the wheel turned easily.

The helmet grew darker, and I wondered if my senses were failing; the ache in my lungs seemed now to have spread to all parts of my neck and chest, and my arms felt as if all energy had been drained from them.

The wheel turned in my hands, mysteriously; a final fragment of rationality told me that Holden and Traveller must be working at their side of the hatch also. I released the wheel and floated into darkness.

The pain evaporated, and a soft illumination began to break through my darkness, a blue-white light like that of Earth.

I fell into the light.

When I opened my eyes again I fully expected to see the inside of my hellish copper helmet-prison once more. But my head was free; the furnishings of the Smoking Cabin were all about me. Holden’s face hovered over me, a round pool of concern. “Ned? Ned, can you hear me?”

I tried to speak, but found that my throat was as sore as if it had been scoured, and I could only whisper, “Holden? I have succeeded, then?”

His lips were pressed together, and he nodded gravely. “You have indeed, my lad. Although I fear we are not out of the woods yet.”

He offered me a globe of brandy; the hot liquid coursed through my wounded throat. I raised my head. Holden pushed me back, saying I should not try to move yet; but I saw that I still wore the air suit, save for the helmet, and was lightly bound by a blanket into my bunk. “Bourne?” I gasped. “Did he survive?”

“Indeed he did, thanks to your generosity,” Holden said. “Although if it were up to me I would have pitched the Frenchie out of the hatch…”

“Where is he?”

“The far bunk, being tended by Pocket. He went without air for perhaps a minute—but Traveller feels he will suffer no permanent damage. Sadly.”

I rested my head back on my pillow. Through the storm of the recent events my surprise at the identity of our saboteur still shone like a clear ray.

“And Traveller?” I asked. “Where is he?”

“On the Bridge.” He smiled. “Ned, while Pocket and I worked at the two of you—unscrewing your helmet and so on—our host made directly for the various instruments of the Bridge, like a child reunited with lost toys!”

I found the strength to laugh. “Well, that’s Traveller. Holden, you said we were not out of the wood; has Traveller reached some verdict already from his instrumentation?”

Holden nodded and bit at his nail. “It appears our French friend has indeed used too much water for our return to Earth to be possible. But that’s not the worst of it, Ned.”

Still stunned, I suppose, by my recent experiences, I absorbed this news with equanimity, and said, “But what could be worse than such a sentence of doom?”

“Traveller has changed. It’s as if he has been galvanized by your example of determination and action; he has now resolved, he says, that we should return to Earth. But, Ned—” Holden’s eyes were wide with fear “—In order to save us, Traveller intends to take us to the surface of the Moon, and search for water there!”

I closed my eyes, wondering if I were trapped within some dream induced by carbonic acid.