Once the man whose bunk was above Joe’s took action. He sneaked a spare gravity coil out of the electrician’s storeroom and set it up above Joe’s bunk. When Joe was asleep he turned it on. It neatly neutralized the normal gravitation of the ship. Joe woke, weightless, gasping in terror. It was that nightmare sensation of unending fall—the sensation the very first rocketeers had when they essayed to “coast” to the moon on their own momentum. They could not sleep, because when they dozed off they woke instantly in the primeval horror of falling. Even on the moon they could not sleep. The gravity was not enough. Some of them died of sleeplessness and— But everybody knows all about that.
The gravity coil was intended as a joke. But it was used nightly, and many times a night, until Joe began to feel an hysterical terror of sleeping. Then an old hand exposed the trick and showed Joe the other trick of strapping himself down so that there was always pressure on his body. It was a substitute for the feel of something—or someone—holding him comfortingly fast. But it was a long time before Joe got back real confidence in sleep.
Back on Earth, Joe’s mother and father very carefully made a boast of Joe’s journeying. They said proudly to their friends that Joe was away out beyond Mars now, which was true. They said that he was an old hand in space now. Which was probably true, too. But he hadn’t seen the stars. He only traveled among them.
On the trip out he actually saw the stars just once, and then it was a bare glimpse. It was a little beyond the orbit of Jupiter, when the Mavourneen was something over two months out from Earth and still accelerating—still going a little bit faster every instant than she’d been going the instant before. Joe was trudging the weary, endless, unchanging corridor in which he oiled motors. He saw the Mavourneen’s first mate coming in the opposite direction.
The mate stopped by a round plate set in the outer wall of the corridor. He took a key from his pocket, unlocked something, and swung the plate inward on a hinge. He looked at what was uncovered.
Joe passed, going on his round. He glanced where the mate looked. Then he froze. The mate was making a routine check of the few, emergency, rarely-or-never-used viewports in the ship’s hull. In the unthinkable event of disaster to the control room—from which the stars were normally viewed— the ship could be navigated by hand with men at such ports as this, reporting to a jury-rigged control room. The mate was simply verifying that they were ready for use. But he uncovered the stars. And Joe looked.
He looked with his own eyes into infinity—past the mate’s head and shoulders, of course. He saw the stars. Their number was like the number of grains of sand. Their color varied beyond belief. For the first time Joe realized that they differed only in brightness and color, because they were all so far away that they were the same size. None was larger than a mathematical point. It was a sight which no man has ever seen save through some such window as the mate had uncovered.
Joe gazed with absolute rapture. The mate matter-of-factly made his verification of the condition of the port and the shutters that closed over it outside—the shutters which infinitesimal meteorites might pit with their tiny, violent explosions if they struck. The mate closed the inner plate, making sure that the outer shutters closed with it. He locked it and turned to go on. He saw Joe, dazed and agitated, staring at the metal plate which had just locked out the universe.
Joe said, swallowing:
“I—never saw the stars before, sir.”
The mate said, “Oh,” and went on.
Joe continued about his duties, but his actions were purely automatic. For two watches he did not see anything much but the tiny, remembered segment of the cosmos, glimpsed beyond the head and shoulders of the Mavourneen’s first mate. He did not notice what he ate. He had seen the stars!
He expanded the vision in his mind. He pictured the cosmos as that small scene multiplied until he could imagine looking in every direction and seeing nothing else, as if he were disembodied in emptiness. By the mere fact of thinking he discovered that odd quirk in man’s constitution by which human beings stay sane in emptiness. The quirk is that the stars do not look far away. There is no feeling of distance. They are so remote that—like the toy-sized houses and roads and forests seen from a transport plane on earth—they lose all scale. They do not move. One knows that there is vastness about, but the sensation is comfortably that of occupying a stable, solid building out of whose windows one sees a backdrop punctured with multitudes of holes. One simply does not feel empty distance all around, through which one might fall screaming for a thousand million years. And therefore men stay sane in space.
Nearing a planet, it is different. Refraction in an atmosphere makes a planet seem round. It is visibly a solid ball and nearer than its background of stars. One has a sensation of height and a conviction that it is far away, and a panicky, desperate need to reach it and feel its huge and reassuring mass...
It is a fortunate thing that one has to use power to get down to a planet’s surface from space.
Joe’s meditations told him all this. Perhaps his companions had seen the stars with the same eagerness as himself, in time past. After the first thrill they felt disappointment. And therefore they voiced their disillusionment in raucous scorn. But still they stayed spacemen . ..
Back on Earth, Joe’s father and mother noticed that the later vision-casts were quite fascinating. They mentioned the matter to each other, pretending astonishment. They admitted ruefully that they were staying up too late and not getting enough sleep. But they didn’t refer to their separate discoveries that it was much wiser to be thoroughly tired out before thinking of going to bed—if one wanted to sleep. To their friends they said brightly that Joe’s ship was out beyond Saturn.
It was. Joe oiled motors and swabbed decks. Presently his parents back on Earth were able to tell their friends confidently that Joe was out beyond Uranus’ orbit. He was. He still swabbed decks and oiled motors and trudged through a white-painted corridor and listened to his companions’ talk —almost exclusively four-letter words—and sometimes he made use of the ship’s crew’s library. Sometimes he watched taped vision-casts.
After a while the ship was beyond Neptune.
Joe’s mother and father knew the Mavourneen was decelerating, now. It made a non-stop voyage because that was the most practical way to make the run. The early rocket explorers hopped from one planet to another, carefully building up fuel stores for their ships before daring to go further. This was because fuel was their great problem. Atomic-powered ships like the Mavourneen handled the matter otherwise. They wanted to use the smallest possible atom-piles, so they used the least power that would lift them. But fuel was no problem, so they kept the power on for half their journeys, building up speed second by second. On the second half of their voyages they used the same power to check the speed they had so painstakingly built up. Doubling the distance traveled in this way did not nearly double the time required to travel it. So, short journeys or broken ones were vastly wasteful of time. Therefore the Mavourneen made no stops on the way to Pluto.
But it was not an exciting journey. Each day Joe oiled and inspected more small motors than he had known could exist, before joining the Mavourneen’s crew. Each day he swabbed decks, broke out stores, painted, polished, and performed other duties incident to the career of a spaceman, second class. On the way out to Pluto he spent a total of more than seven hundred hours at menial tasks, requiring neither skill nor the education his father had paid for. But he was very happy. He had seen a very small portion of the firmament for something like thirty seconds past the head and shoulders of a preoccupied first mate.