SO YOU WANT TO BE A SPACE-FLIER?

by Martin Pearson

SO YOU WANT to be a space-flier?

My friend, if you only knew what you are asking for. Life in a space ship is no
joke. Nor is it a thrilling adventure. You're all alone there; you get tired of
reading. You can't play cards and the like because, first, there's no one with
whom to play and, second, because the cards won't stay put. There's nothing to
see; space scenery is sheer monotony. The whole ship smells; cooking's a rotten,
messy job and the after effects are still more so.
Picture me after I'm about ten days out from Mars, approaching Earth. I still
have five more days to go, am getting into the last sick-and-tired stage of
space-flying. I've read everything in the microfilm box on the way out; for the
return trip there's only a few rolls I picked up at Marsport, books written
about a hundred years ago, dealing with some writer's idea of space-flying and
life on Mars. Naturally, the author knew nothing of his subject.
Oh, those stories about giant spaceships, big crews, Martian princesses, space
pirates, grotesque and malignant space-beings! The first day, they were amusing;
the second day funny, the third day just silly, and the fourth day, I thought
them specimens of sheer stupidity. By the tenth day, I was positive that those
writers were lunatics who had barely managed to keep from being put away.
Picture my ship in contrast to the nonsense this maniac dished out a century
ago. There weren't any fine gravity plates so that I could walk a deck with as
much ease as if I were at home on Earth. Gravity plates could be done, but
they'd raise havoc with drive belts, make your course impossible to figure,
attract thousands of meteors, which would turn the ship into a sieve before you
were two hours out. So, there weren't any fancy gravity plates.
You know what it feels like? It feels like fading. Like falling down an endless
and bottomless elevator shaft out of which all the air has been pumped. Your
organs are drifting around; you have difficulty in swallowing, and every once in
awhile you forget yourself and think you are really falling, flail out in all
directions with consequent damage. Then, when you sleep--oh, when you sleep! You
dream of falling. From the second you close your eyes to the instant you wake
up, yelling your head off, you're falling off a cliff, about to be splattered
all over the ground. Sleeping in space is sheer hell.
Not that it's much better when you're awake. There's still no gravity, remember.
That means, I floated around in mid-air looking like a goldfish in a bowl. Only
not as comfortable; the goldfish is in its element. I had no right-side up, no
top or bottom. Not being built for that sort of thing (for, like it or not,
humans are constructed for planets, not free space) even an experienced spacer
like myself keeps bumping his head, shins, shoulders, funny bone, or stomach
into things--not to mention things bumping into him. Yeah, there's no weight,
true: but things still have their mass and that spells sheer misery. You have
Earth muscles, adapted to Earth conditions; no matter how much space-training
you have had, you can't go easy all the time. All that training can do for you
is give you an idea what you'll be up against. A spaceman won't run into one
tenth the grief that an untrained person would, but the thing is still hellish.
Because, every now and then, you forget and move just a little too fast, then
slam bang into something. No matter how careful you are, after a few days you're
a mass of bruises.
Everything that isn't battened down floats. A roll of microfilm hanging near the

cook stove, a caged frying pan floating along near the porthole, pillows
drifting around in an orbit by the light, old shirts and gadgets. At first, you
decide that this thing won't happen; you'll put everything away, fix it so you
won't have to worry about its drifting loose. After a few days, your outlook has
changed on that. Taking things out and putting them away, as often as you have
to do it, is gruelling labor. The slightest slip of muscles and you're darting
in one direction while the object shoots off in the opposite direction.
And then there's debris. Little crumbs of food; like globules of liquid. You'll
be careful, you think; you won't spill anything, eh? Think carefully: ever see
anyone eating back on Earth who didn't spill something, or drop something,
somewhere during the meal? Just a crumb, or a little drop of water, perhaps. But
that, buddy, is all you need to spill or drop in space. These crumbs, these tiny
droplets of water, don't fall to the tablecloth; they don't fall at all.
They float. They form into perfect little globes, if they're liquid, and take up
an orbit, perfect little planets. If they're crumbs of food, then they become
miniature meteors or planetoids.
Cooking has to be done in the single room allowed for living in your space ship.
Even though your food is mostly canned stuff, concentrated, there's enough that
isn't. Water keeps escaping from you; hot coffee is murderous. You have to keep
it in a closed container while it's boiling; you have to leave it there until it
cools sufficiently to drink. Then you suck it out through a drinking valve in
the pot, directly into your mouth. You can't pour it, because it won't pour in
space. If it got loose, you'd have a big ball of coffee, boiling hot; it would
drift around, wetting and scalding everything it touched. And you'd run into
plenty of grief trying to capture it.
Now re-picture the space ship, ten days out. Dozens of globes, tiny, oft-times
virtually invisible, of water, crumbs, food, etc., floating about, getting in
your eyes, your nose, your hair. Then, a final touch is added by the
ventilation. You see, there isn't any.
The air is purified and re-purified as in submarines. Chemically, it's still
breathable and that's all the designers wanted to know. But, to put it crudely,
the air stinks. The air is foul and it stays foul. The smell of everything
you've cooked remains in full strength. Living there doesn't help the
atmosphere, either.
AFTER FIFTEEN days in a chamber like this, you are sick. You have a case of BO
and halitosis such as no Listerine advertiser ever dreamed of in his palmiest
days. Your digestion is shot to pieces; your muscles lack exercise, and your
eyes are bleary from too much reading, or too much looking at the practically
unshielded glare of the stars outside.
Then there's the little matter of temperature. As a rule, there are two kinds of
temperature on a spaceship. Too hot or too cold. The outside of the ship is half
black and half mirrored. You regulate the temperature by juggling the gyroscope
in the engine room until the ship has swung one of those sides to the sun. If
it's the black side, then you absorb heat; if it's the mirror side, then the
heat is reflected away. By varying you should get your norm--should,
theoretically. Actually, you don't. Not as a rule. You think you have things
just right and go to sleep (falling off a cliff in your dreams); while you're
having your nightmares, the ship has swung slightly on its own axis and you wake
up (screaming) either half frozen or half roasted.
And, you know, there's nothing to do on a spaceship, outside of keeping alive.

That's what finally gets you. But there couldn't be two people, even if the
ships were made larger. Under those conditions, two people would hate each other
in a week and murder each other before the voyage was over. Three or more people
would be impossible.
Well, you ask yourself, why one man then? First of all, let's touch on
generalities.
The course of a space-ship is all figured out by mathematics before it leaves
the planet. The weight is calculated down to the last gram, including crew of
one, food, and so on. The exact second for starting, flight, figures on the
orbit the ship will follow, the orbit of Earth, the orbit of Mars--precisely
where both planets will be at the moment of starting, where they will be the
first day, the second day, etc., midpoint, and when the ship arrives. Plus
research on the orbits of about three thousand asteroids, meteor swarms, the
moon, comets, the sun, the other planets.
It takes about a week of solid calculation by trained mathematicians and
super-machines to work out all the factors. Humans alone could never do it. When
the ship is dispatched, its course is fixed on its control. It doesn't require a
single human hand in operation; no human hand could possibly be as exact as
control timing requires. Once in space you don't navigate; you couldn't possibly
figure out your exact speed and position. All you can do is sit around wondering
whether or not someone made a mistake, or if, perhaps, a wheel slipped somewhere
in the calculating machines. If anything did go wrong, then it's curtains for
you.
So, what's the one man for? Well, in case of accidents--minor accidents--he can
be useful. He can put out fires, prevent cargo from shifting, keep the ship from
absorbing too much heat in any one spot, thus damaging the cargo and records, or
keep the ship from freezing solid in spots, thus ruining the mechanism. And,
after the ship has reached a point of about one hundred miles off the surface of
the planet, the space-man lands the ship.
But, out in space, there's nothing more you can do. Keeping the temperature
steady doesn't require attention; you know it when it hits extremes. You don't
navigate; you don't take readings, and you don't have to swab the decks or clean
the place or oil the engines. You couldn't.
On the whole, the life of the spaceflier is easily the dullest, most dreary and
sickening, irritating, and unhealthy life you can get. That's why there's always
an opening for applicants; it's also why few of them last a year. When you get
back from a flight, you're as weak as if you spent the time strapped to a bed;
you can barely walk; your digestion is ruined and you're filthy, groggy, and
smelly. Your eyes are bad; your lungs are bad, and your stomach's bad. Your skin
is ruined; you've the hair and beard of a hermit. Shaving is impossible under
no-gravity conditions, and the no-gravity treatment for baldness is unbeatable.
You're ornery anti-social, and grumpy when you get back. A 100% sourpuss. You're
poison to your friends and family. It takes days really to get clean, and, until
you do, no one wants to come near you; in comparison, the camel is a
sweet-smelling, pleasant beast. There is no camaraderie among space-men. You

can't make friends on the job, and there's nothing to talk about, for all you
see on Mars is a small, dusty space-port out in the desert. Everyone has read
about that.
And you don't have adventures. If you did, no one would ever know because you
couldn't possibly live to return and tell about it. Space ships whose allotted
course is changed, for any reason at all, just never return.
So when I read that people, a hundred years or so back, around the '30s and '40s
of last century, thought space-fliers would be great heroic guys and wished they
could become spacemen, I have to laugh. Only not because I think it's funny. It
isn't. No wonder they called these people romantics; they just didn't know any
better. I wish I could find me one of the time machines they have in some of
their stories, so I could let them in on the inside dope.
So you want to be a space-flier, eh? You're welcome to it, buddy; as for me, I
know when I've had enough.