QRM-InterplanetarySmith, George O. (George Oliver)
Science
QRM-Interplanetary
Smith, George O. (George Oliver)
Science fiction; Space stations -- Fiction
Arden jumped. She sailed upward, and as she passed through the opening,
Channing caught her by one arm and stopped her flight. "At that speed
you'd go right on across," he said.
She looked up, and there about two hundred feet overhead she could see
the opposite wall.
Channing snapped on the lights. They were in a room two hundred feet
in diameter and three hundred feet long. "We're at the center of the
station," Channing informed her. "Beyond that bulkhead is the air lock.
On the other side of the other bulkhead, we have the air plants, the
storage spaces, and several cubic inches of machinery."
"Inches?" asked Arden. Then she saw that he was fooling.
"Come on," he said. He took her by the hand and with a kick he
propelled himself along on a long, curving course to the opposite side
of the inner cylinder. He gained the opposite bulkhead as well.
"Now, that's what I call traveling," said Arden. "But my tummy goes
_whoosh, whoosh_, every time we cross the center."
Channing operated a heavy door. They went in through rooms full of
machinery and into rooms stacked to the center with boxes; stacked from
the wall to the center and then packed with springs. Near the axis of
the cylinder, things weighed so little that packing was necessary to
keep them from bouncing around.
"I feel giddy," said Arden.
"High in oxygen," said he. "The CO_{2} drops to the bottom, being
heavier. Then, too, the air is thinner up here because centrifugal
force swings the whole out to the rim. Out there we are so used to
'down' that here, a half mile above--or to the center, rather--we have
trouble in saying, technically, what we mean. Watch!"
He left Arden standing and walked rapidly around the inside of the
cylinder. Soon he was standing on the steel plates directly above her
head. She looked up, and shook her head.
"I know why," she called, "but it still makes me dizzy. Come down from
up there. Or I'll be sick."
Channing made a neat dive from his position above her head. He did it
merely by jumping upward from his place toward her place, apparently
hanging head down from the ceiling. He turned a neat flip-flop in the
air and landed easily beside her. Immediately, for both of them, things
became right-side-up again.
* * * * *
Channing opened the door to the room marked: "Air Plant." He stepped
in, snapped on the lights, and gasped in amazement. The room was empty!
Completely empty! Absolutely, and irrevocably vacant. Oh, there was
some dirt on the floor and some trash in the corners, and a trail of
scratches on the floor to show that the life-giving air plant had been
removed, hunk by hunk, out through another door at the far end of the
room.
"Whoa, Tillie!" screamed Don. "We've been stabbed! Arden, get on the
-type and have ... no, wait a minute until we find out a few more
things about this!"
They made record time back to the office level. They found Burbank in
his office, leaning back, and talking to someone on the phone.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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