ATOMIC STATION
By FRANK BELKNAP LONG
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Thrilling Wonder Stories Winter 1946.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
It was incredible and a little frightening. The rocket ship was withina half million miles of the Station, but as yet no reply had come tothe frantic signals which Roger Sheldon had been sending out at tensecond intervals.
He sat before the observation glass in the control room, a big man withthe competent hands of an experienced navigator, and a curious mobilityof expression which seemed out of keeping with the precise movementswhich those hands were making on the board.
His face was that of a man who had gazed on great unfathomable starfields smouldering in the depths of space and then—had deliberatelycurbed his exaltation and turned back to concern himself with thelittle affairs of Earth.
In three months and two days Roger Sheldon had passed completely beyondthe Sun's gravitational tug into the utter darkness, the chill bleakimmensity of interstellar space. To have accomplished more he wouldhave bartered all the years of his youth. He had hardly dared hope toaccomplish as much.
Now he was returning to the Station with his thoughts in a turmoil. Hisnerves were so taut he was afraid to relax even for the brief instantit would have taken him to shake a few grains of amytal into his palmand inhale the fumes.
For two generations the Station had encircled the Earth, an outpost ofsecurity bright with promise, the concrete embodiment of humanity'sdetermination not to destroy itself.
While atomic research had remained in the uranium fission stage, thevast laboratory facilities of Earth had not endangered humanity. Eventhe first atomic bombs had not placed an intolerable strain on man'scapacity to survive the hazards of working together toward a sharedgoal.
But the tremendous series of explosions which had rocked the Earth onJune sixteenth, in 1969, had convinced even men of good will that acontrolled, disciplined release of the mighty forces locked up withinthe atom could no longer take place on Earth.
It could only be allowed in an orbit far enough removed from Earthto jeopardize only the Station itself and the lives of a few men.Carefully integrated psychometric tests had shown that not more thana dozen men could coordinate their efforts under the constant threatof annihilation without developing personality quirks as dangerousas trigger neutrons would have been in the days of the New Mexicoexperiment.
Seventy million miles from the Earth the Station moved through theinterplanetary night, a mile-long floating laboratory. This laboratorywas equipped with every safety device known to modern science for thecontrol of energies powerful enough to disrupt every vestige of matterwithin a half million miles of its orbit.
In 2022 a dozen men could have destroyed the Earth. Instead, on thatlittle self-contained macrocosm, containing accommodations for fewerthan a hundred men, women and children, the first interstellar ship hadbeen constructed and powered with undreamed of energies.
To that little macrocosm the ship was now returning, piloted by one ofthose twelve men.
Sheldon would have thrown back his head and laughed long and heartilyif someone had suggested that power could go to the head of a man likeJohn Gale. Nominally Gale, a great bundle of immense kindliness, asselfless as a carven