Chapter I

The figure of Professor Glover slipped from the surface of the space station and twinkled away among the stars. Jim Britten stared at it as though he could call it back by the ferocity of his gaze. He stood paralyzed by helplessness while the spacesuited body plummeted off into the void, until he could no longer follow its motion towards the dazzling sun. Seized by an uncontrollable shaking, he dropped the radiophone antenna which he had ripped from Glover's back and flung himself down flat upon the surface of the station, where he clung while catching his breath.

A vast doughnut, twenty-five miles in diameter, the space station stood with no apparent motion a thousand miles above the surface of the earth. It floated in a sea of scintillating stars like diamonds scattered upon the blackest velvet.

"Jim, what's the matter?" John Callahan's voice grated in Britten's headpiece.

"Glover's line broke loose," Britten gasped. "He's gone."

"What!"

"I'm coming back in. Give me a hand."

Britten began the long crawl back to the entrance port, his nerves too shattered to attempt it standing up. He was several yards away when another spacesuited figure emerged from the port and helped him stagger the rest of the way. Inside the airlock he collapsed.

* * * * *

In a small room within a large hospital the two men sat talking. It was a featureless room with pale green walls, containing a desk, two soft chairs, and a leather couch. The doctor, middle-aged, inconspicuous, wearing glasses, a small moustache, and a gray suit, sat in one chair. Facing him in the other chair, Jim Britten, young, lean, and visibly depressed, wore pajamas and a hospital robe.

"You've been a sick boy," Morris Wolf told Jim Britten in a conversational tone.

"I guess so." Britten scratched at the arm of his chair and fingered the sleeve of his gown.

"You're coming along, though. When you arrived at the hospital a week ago, you had to be wheeled in and fed like a baby. Now you've pulled out of the hole and we're ready to do some real talking."

"But, doc, I don't know what happened. Honestly. One minute Glover was starting to climb down into the ion-source chamber and the next minute his magnet line came loose, and when I grabbed after him I caught his phone antenna and ripped it off. Then I got the shakes and the next thing I knew I was back on Earth in the hospital."

The psychiatrist reached for his pipe and began to fill it from a large can on the desk.

"It's a great shock to have the person next to you snuffed out like that," he said. "Some people can take it standing up. When you fall apart like that we want to know the reason, so that it won't happen again."

Britten shrugged. "What's the difference? I'll never work in a laboratory again, let alone the Lunatron. I'll never finish my research and I'll never get my degree."

His voice trailed off in a discouraged whisper.

Wolf watched him for a moment.

"That kind of talk is the reason you are still here. You'll work in a laboratory again and you'll get your degree. You're still not quite well. I'm here to help you get well."

Britten shrugged again. "Okay. Bring on the dancing girls," he said, in a resigned tone.

There were no dancing girls, however, only a tall, blonde, squarish doctor in a white dress, who waited for them in the therapy room. Her cigarette made a cocky angle with the firm line of her mouth as she made final adjustments on the bank of electronic equipment that lined one whole wall.

"Jim, this is Dr. Heller," Wolf told him as they walked into the room. "She will work with us in here. Now suppose you get up on this table."

The two husky attendants who were always in the background helped Britten onto the table and strapped him down. As Wolf fastened the electrodes to Britten's head, he said, conversationally, "In the old days we would have just sat and talked to each other. It would have taken months to get to first base. Now we have ways of aiding the memory, of triggering associations, of lowering resistances to thoughts. It makes psychotherapy a much less tedious process than it used to be."

As he spoke, he slipped a hypodermic needle into Britten's arm.

"Now, suppose we see how much we can remember. Let's begin the day before Glover was killed. I want you to think back to that day and remember everything that happened, how you felt, what you thought about. We want to go through this traumatic experience of yours, and relate it to the elements in your life which caused such a profound shock."

And in addition--Wolf thought bleakly to himself--a good many people were anxious to know other things. For example: was Glover's demise at this particular time a coincidence? The Atomic Energy Commission, though cagy about their reasons, had given top priority to the answers to their questions.

The strength of official interest in this case was further evidenced by the assignment of Bill Grady and Calvin Jones as attendants to Jim Britten. For some time Morris Wolf had wondered vaguely why two such clean-cut and alert young men should follow the low-paid calling of hospital attendant, until recently he had become aware that their pay checks actually came from the U. S. Treasury by way of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

"Now," Wolf said, as Alma Heller switched on the tape recorder, "tell us what you remember."

* * * * *

After a year of being stationed on the Lunatron, Jim Britten had the feeling of being fed up. Lunatics they call us, he thought. Real crazy.

Looking out of the ports, he saw a black, starry space in which the only thing that ever changed was the view of the earth, a thousand miles below, and the moon which was sometimes on one side and sometimes on the other. The stars were incredible jewels, and the sun was something that one never looked at with mortal eyes.

There was bitterness in his heart as he thought of his initial thrill at being chosen to do his thesis research on the Lunatron. He had been an envied boy, but now, after a year, he would have given the chance to the first bidder. But there was no way to back out, short of breaking his contract or breaking his neck. Passage to and from Earth was too costly to be used on weekend vacations.

Many people on Earth would have been excited by the chance to work for two years with Professor Glover on the ten-thousand-billion-volt proton synchrotron which they called the Lunatron. Most physicists thought they were lucky if they could spend a few months with the fifty-billion-volt antique at Brookhaven.

But at Brookhaven you are only a few minutes from New York. Up on the space laboratory Britten was a year from any place, and every day that went by made it a day less.

"Johnny, what's the first thing you're going to do when you get back to Rhodesia?" he asked his roommate.

Britten sat, twanging half-heartedly at his guitar, while Johnny lay undressed on his bunk, his body hard and black against the white sheet.

"Oh, I have a good job lined up in a brand new research institute in Salisbury."

"I don't mean that," Britten said, impatiently. Johnny was such a serious boy. "I mean don't you think of all the fun you're going to have when you get back to Earth? Don't you think of getting a girl friend and living like everybody else lives?"

But Johnny's deep brown eyes remained serious, and he said, "Coming up here has been a great opportunity to learn something so that I will be able to do good work when I get back. Everybody down there does not get such a chance."

Well, Britten thought, that's how it had been with him at first. Now he could think of nothing but walking arm in arm with a pretty girl--_his_ girl--down the street of a big city at night, drinking in the excitement, the feeling of being with other people among the bright lights, under a sky that would be dark blue instead of black, that might have clouds in it, that might even send down rain, instead of being the stark changeless interstellar space that existed up above.

Scientists aren't supposed to have thoughts like these. But Britten was young, he was homesick, and he was bored. A young, homesick scientist cannot remain a solemn, dedicated, single-minded scientist.

* * * * *

The next day at work he absentmindedly switched on some pieces of apparatus in the wrong order and burned out a minor piece of electronics.

"Damn it, Britten," Professor Glover shouted at him. "Where are your brains? Replacements are expensive up here. Time is expensive!"

Britten began shaking with rage. Words rushed to his tongue which he choked down unsaid because Glover had the power of life or death over his degree and these two years must not be torn out of his life for nothing.

"I'm sorry," he said, in an unsteady voice. "I guess I'm not all here today. It won't take long to repair the damage."

"Never mind," Glover said. "You're coming off the project, anyway."

Britten stood still. The anger roared back into his head.

"I'm coming off the project? What happens to the year I've just spent?"

Glover suddenly seemed more embarrassed than angry.

"I'm sorry, Britten," he said, "but it's for your own good. This project has just become classified and you'd never get a publishable thesis out of it."

Britten stood there looking at Glover. "This is a hell of a time to tell me," he exploded, finally. "What's become so secret about this experiment?"

"Obviously, I can't tell you. I'm sorry, but we'll make it up to you somehow. We'll think of something you can do while you're here, and if necessary you can stay a little longer."

_Stay longer!_ Outraged, Britten fled to his room. It was all he could do to stick out the remainder of his two years.

He could not sleep that night. Little teeth of anger nibbled into his mind, while the basic question repeated itself in endless circles. Why had his experiment been pulled out from under him?

Fundamental experiments in high-energy particle physics were not generally classified secret. What were they doing which had suddenly become so important?

The general purpose of the space laboratory was to gather basic information about the laws of nature. The optical telescopes studied the planets as well as the farthest nebulae, unimpeded by atmospheric disturbances. The tremendous twenty-five-mile-diameter radiotelescope pinpointed short-wave radio vibrations from all parts of space. The solid-state group could study the properties of matter in a vacuum chamber of rarity unattainable anywhere on Earth.

In Jim Britten's group, known variously as the Elementary Particle Division, the Lunatron group, or simply as the Lunatics, the topic of investigation was the meson. A long time ago people had considered atoms the most elementary particles. Then they found out about protons and neutrons, which were the bricks that made up the atomic nuclei. A little later, when scientists learned how to build atom smashers such as the two-billion-volt proton synchrotron, they found that they could knock mesons out of the nucleus, and they decided that the protons and neutrons were not so simple after all.

Year after year the atom smashers had become bigger and bigger. There came a time when they could not be built on the surface of the Earth any longer, so a space laboratory was conceived, built around the doughnut of the ten-thousand-billion-volt proton synchrotron. Protons, whirling around for thousands of cycles in this vast doughnut, eighty miles in circumference, could acquire energies equal to those of the most powerful cosmic rays. Even mesons shattered at this energy.

By inspecting the remnants of these broken mesons, scientists could begin to get some idea as to the ultimate structure of matter and energy.

Now, Jim Britten thought, what was there about this work that should suddenly become too secret to be published? Peace had reigned on Earth for many years, and it was once more fashionable to think of science as being free and unbound by security regulations.

But not, apparently, here in Glover's private domain. Rephrase the question, Britten thought. What was there about this work which had suddenly made it desirable for Professor Glover to take Britten off the project? Was there more to this experiment than Britten had seen up to the present?

Sitting through the night, Britten thought and calculated, filling his desk top with paper, feeling the frustration of a scientist who spends day after day with the details of an experiment, pushing buttons, reading meters, soldering wires, until he begins to lose sight of the ultimate aim of the project.

As he fell asleep, long towards morning, his anger was still at a furious temperature, filling his mind with dreams of a tormented, violent nature, which he forgot promptly upon awakening.

* * * * *

Professor Glover stopped by to see him as he ate a late breakfast.

"We have a job to do today," Glover said, his voice tinged with an impersonal annoyance that was not directed at Britten.

Britten stared up at Glover with a hostility that made no impression upon the scientist.

"The ion source has gone bad and has to be replaced," Glover continued. "The spacesuits are being readied in the airlock."

"Why us?" Britten complained. "What's the matter with the maintenance crew?"

Glover's frown deepened. "They're busy with other things. You're free for the moment, and so am I."

Then his face cleared, and he slapped Britten on the back.

"Come on, fella, snap out of it. It'll do us both good to put on the suits and get out in free space."

Britten uttered grumbling noises about "a guy can't even finish a cup of coffee," and followed Glover out to the maintenance lock nearest the ion source.

As he climbed out of the airlock, there again came the sensation of vertigo which he felt every time he stood on this island suspended in nothingness. The circumference of the doughnut stretched its great arc away from him in both directions, while twelve miles away, at the center of the circle, was the spherical shape of the radiotelescope receiver. The long, slender girders which bound the station together had a fragile, spidery appearance.

Britten and Glover walked clumsily to the linear accelerator which projected one-billion-volt protons into the initial lap of their long journey around the doughnut. At the far end of the hundred-foot tube, within a shielded chamber, was the glass bottle of the ion source. Normally, a brilliant crimson flame glowed within this bottle as numberless protons were stripped from their electrons, to be hurled down the accelerator tube. Now there was nothing but the blackened, dead glass.

As they approached the chamber that surrounded the ion source, Britten found that the resentment left over from the previous night had a new object upon which to fasten. Why should he be doing the work that belonged to the technicians? In his anger he lost sight of the fact that Professor Glover was out there doing the same thing.

Damned slave labor, he thought. A PhD candidate was at the bottom of the heap, the lowest form of existence, pushed around by everybody else. Glover thought he was being clever, pushing him off the project, making excuses about security, when probably his aim was to keep for himself the Nobel Prize that the experiment was going to receive some day. Thought he could keep his poor stupid student in the dark about the outcome of the experiment--but the poor student wasn't as stupid as he thought.

Glover reached the hatch that opened into the ion-source chamber and started undoing the fastenings. Suddenly he turned and stared at Britten.

"Where's the new ion source?" he snapped. "Don't tell me you left it in the airlock!"

Britten stammered wordlessly, shocked out of his reverie.

"Well, of all the stupid--Go back and get it! I'll remove the old source."

Glover turned his back and continued to unfasten the hatch.

Rage came into full bloom instantly. Without an instant's thought, Britten reached out both hands, wrenched the antenna rod from Glover's back, tore his anchoring lines from their snaps, and pushed the struggling body out into space, where it soon dwindled away into a tiny speck.